The news reports this morning that a guy in Essex is being prosecuted by Braintree District Council for littering, after he used his windscreen wipers to remove a banana skin thrown onto his car by schoolkids at the side of the road.
How did they find out about this egregiously anti-social act? A council official was driving in the car behind him, and when he saw the offending banana skin fly from the windscreen and come to rest in the road he phoned the council's litter line and reported the offence.
Forgive me for asking, but even if, as people with no wit or imagination will tell you, "rules are rules", what kind of man (I am using the term generously) when he's not in the office, even if he is still technically within working hours, would be so petty and small-minded and vengeful (like a Dostoyevsky character is vengeful, for the "small insults"), he would take the trouble to phone a special line and give a detailed description of a banana skin tosser so the forces of law and moral correction could swoop and punish him? People say now that the curse is unacceptable, but GET A LIFE.
This is the man your government wants you to be. Obedient, living cautiously within set perameters, feeling wrath towards those who don't, no extravagance, no colour, no vision, a Puritan in all but name.
Every time I hear a story like this I come a little closer to a log hermitage in the deep woods where no pasty-faced impotent Good Citizen can find me. If there are any woods left in England that aren't policed by somebody, which I doubt...
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