Digging In For Victory
So, the provisional wing of the farming community were threatening to continue their anarchist, anti-government fuel protests by blocking the main roads with tractor convoys. Were we supposed to notice the difference? Seemingly immune to any laws relating to lighting up times, they already time the processions of their snail-paced juggernauts to coincide with the morning and evening rush hours, gouging miles of snaking ruts in the tarmac, then re-surfacing the roads with the contents of their fields. Is it the result of a deep, smouldering resentment caused by the banning of their annual, post-harvest impressions of war time Dresden?
When these “guardians of the countryside” aren’t busy ploughing up footpaths, or making them impassable by churning them up with horses’ hooves, they occupy themselves by rampaging through people’s gardens on horseback, slaughtering kittens, then disposing of their surplus hounds on the nearest railway line. Any other spare time left after spraying the countryside with poisonous chemicals, snapping the beaks off chickens and force feeding cows with their ground up relatives, is spent littering the fields and ditches with the residue-laden containers, and carefully arranging tasteful displays of polythene sacks and tangled, deadly masses of frayed, orange baler twine.
Then, after tearing up a few miles of hedgerow before lunch, the afternoons are spent clearing out the crew yard waste, adding it to the existing muck mountain in a remote corner of some far-flung, EEC subsidised, set-aside field, belching off back to their four bedroom, stone built farmhouses in their tax exempt, red-diesel powered vehicles, and leaving their steaming shit volcanoes to spill their bubbling, black filth into an adjacent watercourse.
After setting up filthy, knackered and leaking old diesel pumps to chug and pollute away into the night, lowering the river levels and annoying the neighbours, the evenings are then free for them to relax by blasting the living daylights out of any of the remaining wildlife that they haven’t already strangled, gassed, choked, or poisoned, leaving the countryside knee-deep in lead shot and empty cartridge cases. But of course, these are “country ways”, that the townies don’t understand.
At least no one can accuse them of instigating the wholesale gassing of badgers, and of poisoning birds of prey.