The Towy yesterday afternoon only five hundred yards from riot-torn streets
Well, it was only a matter of time. The riots and antisocial behaviour, manifestations of the "broken society", finally came to my street over the weekend. At least we had warning - the local agricultural show is always on the third Saturday of August and so I had removed my car into a back street and awaited the worst.
Sadly the worst was in evidence the next morning. The flower pot outside my house supplied by the Town Council had like last year been turned over. As I scraped the earth back into the pot and replanted the petunias two thoughts occur to me...
First, as the victim of this heinous horticultural crime for a moment I feel that no punishment would be too harsh for the perpetrator; for those few seconds I scoff at my own bleeding heart liberal views. This of course is why you need a dispassionate judicial system to hand down proportionate penalties unsullied by political considerations, something which some politicians have forgotten in recent days.
Second, I guess we should be grateful that the young farmers of West Wales confine their annual riot to some loud noise into the early hours plus broken beer glasses and a patchwork of vomit pools visible around the town the next morning. Fortunately they do not seem to have subscribed yet to the "gangsta" culture of guns and drugs which David Starkey has been provocatively pointing towards - just as well as most of them have shot-gun certificates!
Postscript:
Mrs Blog is appalled to find me up early again on Sunday watching Match of the Day. In vain I attempt to convey the drama of the Swans draw against Wigan and especially goal-keeper Michel Vorm's penalty save. He cost Swansea £1.5 million - apparently money well-spent. Quite a contrast to the soccer I used to play when we always put one of the fatter, more immobile boys in goal in the vain hope that he would physically block more of the goal and anyway would take all the blame when his defences were inevitably breached.
