Battle of Who Could Care Less

Strange times in our sleepy little village, which we now have to leave, forever, before the summer is done. Over the past year or so we have had to deal with small incidents of antisocial behaviour from young village teens who, led by a fattening chav princess, have competed to see who could act most selfishly. Dumb, meaningless gestures like standing in the road and refusing to get out of the way of cars (which rapidly fell from fashion when a local tree surgeon jumped out of his Toyota pick-up with a baseball bat), or breaking into communal areas of flats to smoke (which rapidly fell from fashion when the Angry Man Who Drives The Ford Orion kicked a chav kid so hard his consonants came out hard).

In fact, the whole anti-social thing came to a bit of a halt when the chavs, led by their now fully-fattened princess, (who seemed to go from 14 to 28 in an angry, bleak, futureless year) were laughed at when they complained to local police about being hit by the grown-ups.

Still, this has been the only drawback to living in this strange little village, unless you count the travel to get to civilisation (not to mention the friends we left behind back where shops stay open past 7 pm and people don’t stare open-mouthed at vehicles with blue flashing lights). Our little hill, our lovely park where we walk the kids, the curry house where they automatically pour a pint of Kingfisher the second I walk over the threshold...

But we have to move. We are so overcrowded the flat looks like the set for Monty Python’s Every Sperm Is Sacred song and dance. In fact it’s only a matter of time before either Mervyn or Grunhilde has to sleep in the washing machine, while the other kips in a bag hanging from the washing line.

But we don’t want to leave.

We don’t want to have to move to somewhere like Crawley, or Woking, or, God forbid, Kent. We like it here. We’re used to it here. We just can’t quite (and it’s only a matter of a couple of hundred thousand quid) afford to stay here.

And I was so much anticipating sending my teenage kids to push flaming envelopes of dog shit through that chav princess’s letterbox in 13 years time when she’s a grandmother...