You got teabaggers?

We got street furniture abusers.

I continue my extremely intermittent series on British crimes against street furniture with this court report:

A 22-year-old man challenged a lamppost to fight after he was ignored by passers-by in the street, a court heard on Wednesday.

Drunken David Robinson turned on the innocent streetlight after a number of walkers ignored his pleas to engage him in a stand-up fight.

As police officers watched, Robinson directed his anger at the lamppost and shouted at it to “come and have a go.”

Now I’ve been known to get mildly ruefully wound up by some municipal crimes against art, but this is beyond the pale. We consider this sort of deviant behavior worthy of 80 hours of community service hereabouts.

Other more extreme forms of deviant behavior against innocent street furniture excite such outrage that I heard an old geezer on a Radio 2 lunchtime phone-in just now suggest that the appropriate response would be to put the miscreant in the stocks and have the local populace urinate on him in turn. Oh, the context:

The student who urinated over a war memorial during a mass bar crawl was warned he could be jailed yesterday.

Philip Laing, 19, was described as being “ashamed, disgusted and embarrassed” at his behaviour when he appeared in court.

But a judge suggested the former public schoolboy should also have been joined in the dock by organisers of the seven-hour drinking binge he had been on.

Indeed, the Daily Mail is so outraged by this turn of events that they illustrate their article with a photo of a guy urinating on a public monument in case readers are unable to muster the energy to mentally reconstruct the offense for themselves. (I assume that’s pixelation and not some weird and embarrassing quirk of our NHS that’s come back to haunt us. But probably NSFW if you’re a stone mason.)

Posted by YAFB on 11/05/09 at 09:56 AM • Permalink

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