Wednesday 22 August 2012

Graffiti Madness

Graffiti mess

I like to think we live in quite a nice neighbourhood, but maybe I’m kidding myself.

When I was on a casual jaunt recently, I noticed the wall running alongside the quaint little footpath adjacent to the bottom of our rear garden had acquired some rather rude ‘daubings’ (as Alan Partridge would no doubt have termed them).

The graffiti ran along the wall for some distance (probably 30 metres or so in total). The focal points were two rather rude words about 20 metres apart – one rather racist (if hilariously misspelled) in small letters and another in massive letters that was a certain 4 letter word beginning with c). I don’t know – kids today, huh?

There were also some very large squiggles (maybe they had exhausted their knowledge of “naughty” words by then) in an uninspiring mixture of yellow and blue. Heck – those cans of spray paint are expensive!

Be right back

The fact our neighbourhood had been graffitied came pretty darn close to annoying me – I’m a sensitive chap like that, but then again, a dropped cola can or pizza box in the street can send my blood pressure soaring.

Although only a small proportion of the graffiti was on our property, (probably the tail end of one of the squiggles), I thought I’d do my neighbours a good turn and report it. I looked on our local council’s website and was amused to see they had a special graffiti reporting tool where you could pin a pointer to the on-screen map showing where the graffiti was located. Sadly, map pin gizmo wasn’t working in any of the 3 web-browsers I tried, so I resorted to describing the location in words in a handy (if less technically advanced) text box.

Long story short, the council rolled up the next day with their graffiti removal kit (I’m guessing as to exactly what that comprised -- I was at work at the time -- but I hope it was more than a bucket of soapy water and a sponge. Well, bless their cotton socks, they removed the 2 offending words but left everything else!  Yes, the 20 metre long squiggles weren’t worth it, apparently, nor were the kids’ attempts at scrawling other words which they’d bodged in some way and tried to cover up. After all, where councils are concerned, efficiency seems to be a concept avoided wherever possible.

Why make one trip when you can make several?

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