Grandad July 24th, 2007
I was browsing the Sunday Times and came across a little snippet.
I’m sure they wont mind me stealing robbing borrowing it ……
Council officials have warned a woman that birds in her garden are singing too loudly. Environmental health officers told Dorothy Berry, 65, that the blackbirds in her trees were upsetting neighbours in Fulham, west London.
“I have a lovely garden in which the blackbirds sing in the trees. But I really don’t see what we can do about that.”
What?
These morons are complaining about blackbirds?
This is so stupid, it just has to be true.
I don’t know which is worse – the neighbours, for complaining, or the council for listening to them.
I’d ram the neighbours’ iPods up their backsides and play Status Quo at them at full volume for a week.
They might appreciate the beauty of a blackbird then.
Grandad July 24th, 2007
I went down to the village again for coffee yesterday.
This is getting to be a habit.
As I sat in the sun, supped my coffee and puffed the pipe with Sandy sitting at my feet, I contemplated village life.
When I first moved here [long before most of you were born], it was just a little country village. I was treated as a ‘blow-in’ at first and was tolerated with politeness. It was a close knit community where everyone knew everyone else and outsiders were treated with a little suspicion.
I moved away for some years, without losing my village connections, and am back again. The place has changed. The village is much the same but houses are springing up in the surrounding area. The new ‘blow-ins’ are all so impressed to be living the village life, but they don’t understand what village life is.
Their community consists of the golf club or the tennis club. They sit in the village and arrange dinner parties [at the top of their voices so that we are in no doubt what they are talking about] on their mobile phones. Of course, they all drive SUVs. They talk [again, as loudly as possible] how they are just back from Thailand and can’t wait to get to Marbella next month.
The village is infested with affluenza.
Those of us from ‘the old days’ are now firm friends. We are sticking together like animals in a dwindling clump of rain forest.
We know our days are numbered.
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