pumpkinstrokemarrow

Anyway, climb onto a subway car and sit down. Try to puzzle out what line I am on, where we are and which way we are going. After some time, work out that I am two stops from the wrong end of the right line. Leap off. Spot delapilated and dingy train on the other platform which will, presumably carry me back the other way. Rush through the underpass, up onto the other platform to find all the other passengers getting off. The guard being very officious and official. Something wrong with something or someplace. After a while everybody gets back on again. Me included. Just about manage to find a seat, now encumbered with no less than three brief cases and two umbrellas. Have great rouble keeping them out of peoples' way. Start conversations with all and sundry around me about the difficulty of understanding how their subway system works. At first people are patient and helpful but eventually give me up as a bad job.

Get off the train in a rather smart new and leafy suburban town centre. Hotel nearby. Go for walk with someone who got off the train who turns out to be a school teacher of Latin. I start boasting about how much time I spent on Latin as a child - an hour a day, five days a week for five years as I recall, but I would not be surprised to learn that I exaggerate. In any event, don't remember very much of it now. Latin teacher boils with envy at the seriousness with which his subject used to taken in the old country. Latin teacher morphs into someone completely different and we carry on walking. Start to think that I am getting a long way from the hotel. Wake up.

Wake up to read all about the travails of parking in Exminster, Devon. It seems that cuddly Devon villages have just as much angst about parking as we do in Epsom. All kinds of problems. All kinds of interesting solutions. The big bad lorries from Tesco's being part of the problem. All those ladies taking their sprogs to school in great big GPV's being another part of the problem. But what they do seem to have going for them, is that the Parish Council is the fount of authority on such matters. And the Parish Council is close enough to its parishioners - they might even talk to them in the pub (Exminster still managing one such) - for them to be able to take their pulse properly. For there to be a real consultation. Everybody gets a say. More clearly democracy at work that what has to go on in larger places.

Which led me on to wonder how bad things would have to get with feral youth (the sort that terrorise special needs families to death on housing estates), before a quorum of adult males organise themselves and take them out. Maybe administer a bit of summary justice in the park. Not something to be attempted single handed these days, but I doubt if many gangs of feral youth would stand up to, say, ten men on a mission. If I leafleted our road on such a matter, would I muster 10? I rather suspect that I would. The problem would be to have enough energy to carry the thing through. To organise a meeting, to organise a posse, to procure and issue staves. Preferably the sort of things that boy scouts used to sport on parades, the size and shape of a broomstick but made of entire hazel. Heavy enough to crack heads and long enough to keep knives and bottles off, but not big enough to do serious damage. All this leaving aside the problem that if one was to administer summary justice in this way, one might get done for ABH on a minor if not worse. Conspiracy. Who knows. Much easier to lock the doors, hunker down and hope for the best; an easy option if one no longer has children at home who need to get out and about.