All Ears 25th July

Faintly uninspiring colour scheme this week - sorry!
(BTW for further ruminations on rural unpleasantness check out the genius 'Hard Life in the Country' by the Fall - wonderful stuff!)

(Article by Michael Holden)
Spend most of your life in the city it’s easy to drum up the notion that out there in the countryside everyone’s more laid back. Go there though, and the truth reveals itself soon enough. People in the country are as demented as anyone else, it’s just that you have to go there to find them. The problem is species wide. Our malice knows no postcodes, I thought, as I watched people unravel in the reception Portakabin of a campsite in the middle of nowhere.

Site Manager (addressing three women) “You ain’t staying here. You’re a group.”

Woman 1(the eldest) “We ain’t a group. We’re a family.”

Woman 2 “She’s my auntie.”

Woman 1 “We just want to put her tent next to ours.”

Site Manager (enjoying himself) “Then you’re a group.”

Woman 1 “She’s got a baby-get the baby!”

Woman 2 motioned to a young man who had been loitering in the car park who then entered the office holding up a baby.

Woman 1 “See!”

Site Manager “I says you’re a group, and we can’t have no groups. Baby or no, that’s the end of it.”

Woman 1 “You’re out of order!”

Site Manager “Yeah, well listen to this. They ain’t staying here, and you can pack up and leave and all.”

Woman 1 “You can’t do that!”

Site Manager “Get out of the office, get off the site.”

Woman 1 “I ain’t standing for this.”

She marched out past me yelling at the other as they walked.

Woman 1 “Get Alan on the phone and call Dean. Get ‘em the fuck down here!”

I thought it best to leave before Alan and Dean turned up and kicked the life out what was left my esteem for humanity.