Its traveller season and for the second time in as many months, the byways and fields near my house are festooned with travellers and their caravans.
Please don’t confuse this with the romantic notion of travellers in beautiful hand-painted Romany style caravans, an old cart and lazy horse nearby, mischievous grubby faced children poking from behind the protective legs of their father who is nonchalantly smoking on a pipe: the gentle singing from mother tending the livestock and the heavy nose of burning wood hanging in the air.
No. I’m talking about the vandals who pull up in their huge caravans, rip down the wooden fence to illegally gain access the private property, let their pack of hounds run loose across the fields and immediately begin bagging up and dumping their waste that they have accumulated since the last fly-tipping session in amongst the trees and hedgerows: their children throwing sticks at passing cars and greeting you with a vulgar f*** off!” as you drive past, whilst proud father stands by, topless, swigging from a can of special brew.
The local council and police seem apathetic to their actions. The view seems to be to turn a blind eye and they will move on eventually because, what with all the form filling and red tape to get through, you may as well sit back and do nothing, it will be just as quick.
Now don’t think me a boorish bigot. I have no qualms with travellers who don’t resort to vandalism to gain access to a field: keep their livestock and pets under control, and (most importantly) clear up after themselves. For goodness sake, there is a rubbish dump less that 1 mile away!
I don’t begrudge anyone from choosing an alternative lifestyle. Who am I to say what way people should live? But the thing that irks me is, in a few weeks they will disappear into the night and all that will be left is a churned up field, a broken fence and hedgerows garlanded with fetid, bursting bags of rubbish. Cue the dutiful council, who appear almost as soon as they have left, to quickly remove the rubbish, fix the fences and remove any signs they were ever there. The bitter pill is not that these slovenly dossers choose an enviable lifestyle with little responsibility for which I secretly yearn, it is that mine and your council tax bills pay for this annual mess to be routinely cleaned up.
