Council CuntsStallion Explosion writes "I was in a record shop in Melbourne, flicking through the vinyl, when I found a record entitled 'Hackney Council Are A Bunch Of Cunts'"
We agree.
Have you been trapped in the relentless petty minded bureaucracy of your local council?
Why does it require 3 forms of ID to get a parking permit when the car in question is busy receiving a parking ticket right outside the parking office?
Or do you work for Hackney Council?
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chthonic, Thu 26 Jul 2007, 10:51)
This question is now closed.
Our school council (I was once a member) is (now) a bunch of cunts/quarter-assed reply
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St. Defenestration The REAL one, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 15:39,
Reply)
Parking ticketsOutside my house there is a single yellow line. Lord knows why, its a residential area, a good mile or so from the town and for some reason it only goes down 1/4 of the road. The sign only restricts parking from 8am to 8pm on a Saturday, again, god knows why, but the net result is all the poor buggers who live in the top 1/4 of the street, after a long week at work, don't get a lie in on Saturday morning as we have to move our cars before the traffic cunt comes along for his easy kills.
So ... I have lived hear for over 10 years, and being a lazy bastard and unwilling to get up early, I got a couple of tickets a month.
Also because I am an unorganised bastard, I seldom paid on time and so usually paid at the higher £45 late payment rate.
Now comes the good bit.
Quite a while ago, a B3tan posted "the magic words" on a QOTW about parking tickets. I forget who, but I love them dearly.
After reading this god like B3tans post, I did a bit of research and found that the yellow line outside my house was invalid. It had not been terminated (look it up on the web).
One photograph and letter later, I entered into "lengthy correspondance" with the council and was eventually sent a refund cheque for £5,550 after they were forced to cancel all tickets issued on the line.
I then wrote up a newsheet type thing detailing what I had done and posted it through every letterbox on my street which resulted in many more thousands of ponds paid back to my neighbours (and quite a number of bottles of wine whiskey and boxes of choccies to say thanks to me from said neighbours).
You may call me petty, but I kept the cheque for a few days until the next saturday so I could wait for the joyless traffic Nazi to turn up to do his usuall ticket run outside my house. I popped out to meet and greet him, waved the cheque under his nose and followed him for 100 yards up the road laughing hysterically calling him a useless cunt.
If the B3tan who made the original "Magic words" post messages me, I have a bottle of the finest malt with your name on it mate.
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RadG Drinking Mojitos in the sun, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 15:37,
Reply)
SHEFFIELD CITY COUNCILIt is an anagram of "Cunts icily filched foe" though...
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XCDinglyGoodCakes looks like we've got ourselves a reader, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 15:33,
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Sheffield City Council - AGAINIsn't it peculiar that SHEFFIELD CITY COUNCIL is an anagram of WE ARE A USELESS BUNCH OF CUNTOXES WHO FUCK HANDFULS OF OUR OWN SHIT AND WOULD RAPE YOUR MOUTH GIVEN HALF A CHANCE? What are the odds, eh?
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CaptainCrackerjack live trout, slow motion, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 15:16,
Reply)
CuntyNext week, I start my new job in a call centre handling payments and inquiries for speeding fines and parking tickets.
I look forward to your abuse.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 15:12, Reply)
Yay For Rhyming Slang...What have my local council and ‘up the council’ got in common?
They’re both tight, and can lead to painful experiences that usually involves quite a bit of shit
more comparisons to follow?
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Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Tue 31 Jul 2007, 15:09,
Reply)
It could be worse....Yes, the council are ill-educated, unadulterated poo-pants but do you know what happens to the plebs who are just too fuckstick-thick to work for the council?
?
They all work for the (Old NTL section) of Virgin Media.
And not as waste-paper baskets like you'd imagine, but actually OPERATING THE PHONELINES!
It's true
Jesus-H-God-Bastard-Christ-on-a-bike!
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Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:56,
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Is there anybody stupid enough to think....Ok then - Here's my cash!Apparently some tree has got it’s roots in the drains…not by my house….not even by my street, but somewhere about 2 miles away, but which allegedly comes under ‘our residential area’ so the Coventry City Cockspots want each household in our whole neighbourhood to pay £500+ pounds EACH towards PULLING A FUCKING TREE OUT OF A DRAIN!!!.
Now as you can imagine, there are quite a few thousand people that come under ‘our residential area’, yet strangely, the uptake has been less than brilliant for the council.
I think when I received the letter I used the words ‘they can pucker up and peck my poo-chute...and fuck off while they’re doing it!’
What’s the betting the ‘unfortunate incident’ is under some local councillor’s house who can’t be arsed to stump up the cash himself? Grrrrrr
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Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:48,
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Paper, paper everywhere...The place where I work generates ALOT of extra paper, some of which we rip up and use for notepads and the like. But there is too much of it for it all to be used (even more so now everything is computerised of course.) We also generate a great deal of waste cardboard which is collected once a week by a company employed by the council to do just that. A colleague rang the council to ask if they could provide a large bin for the paper similar to the one we put our cardboard in. They're thinking about it. She explained that in the meantime a couple of us are taking their wastepaper home and putting in their own recycling bins. 'I'll have to pretend I didn't hear that,' the woman at the council said, 'because it counts as industrial waste and shouldn't be handled by individuals.'
So it's all right for 'industrial waste' to get chucked into the rubbish that goes into landfill, then?
Plus, it's fucking PAPER.
Every so often I get lift home with several carrier bags of paper. I empty them into the recyclying bin and the next day I take the carrier bags back to work (I work behind the scenes in a shop) ready to use them again. It makes fuck all difference to the planet but it gives me satisfaction.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:46, Reply)
Sheffield RoadsFollowing up on the lower post about Sheffield City Council and the city roads...
1. If you've never been to Sheffield city centre - DON'T drive there. You will get lost. When the tram system was installed (which goes from nowhere to nowhere whilst avoiding the main population centres around the town - another great council scheme, like the World Student Games fuck up and the New Town Hall) the council had the great idea of making much of the road system one-way. So, you'll either get lost, give up and go somewhere else, or somehow find yourself on Manor Top. Which you don't want to be.
2. Some of the roads around the town are Sheffield's own version of the RAC Rally. I'm talking the whole of Rivelin Valley, much of Ecclesfield and Chapeltown and don't get me started on Hillborough. I can only talk of the north side of town but I'm sure the south side is worse.
3. The 'ring road' - it's not a ring, and it does a pretty poor job of allowing you to get anywhere. And the new inner ring road is just a wider, quicker route for pimps and punters to make their way through the red light district.
I'm not bitter about Sheffield, I love my home town and driving through it is much more tolerable than Manchester or Birmingham. But that's only after 10 years practice...
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:44, Reply)
Chew the rage back.....CHEW IT BACK!!!It’s a few years ago now…. Me and the present Mrs Pooflake get our first shagpad. We were fine upstanding citizens but perhaps a little naïve. The electric company call: “If you arrange by Direct Debit blah blah”… So smart enough, we do that and it’s fine….and so on with the gas, phone and every other company in the English speaking world who want our cash for some sort of service…except Coventry City Cuntwads…OH NO! – They do wankety-all for over a year, then send us a letter stating their ‘oversight’ and stiff us with a bill for £1300!
Now we were young and poor so I politely told them to ‘lick my arse and call it chocolate’ –and within 1 cocking week of their original letter started threatening court action until I coughed up. Which I did, and hated myself for doing so. I wish I had more of a spine sometimes. I also wish they all get gonorreah very soon
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Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:30,
Reply)
Councils, dont do it........A tad off quote but it has the word "Council" in it so here goes.
Only time I ever laughed at hearing "that" word was when the 10 year old daughter recently asked what a "council" house was (I now live in the west end, but I cant by any stretch be considered posh as daughter (she of the 10 years) is constantly correcting my speech/dress sense/hair style etc........... I digress........
How times have changed.
My point?
Protect your children.
Have f all to do with councils or their workings........... ever (if you can).
If you cant, stick to the following....
1. Fill out the form's, correctly. (If your not sure what is needed then remember it's for the council, it's generally run for under achievers "by" under achievers. There will "always" be a citizens advise or chav group who will know what is required, kid on your one of them and have them do the form for you).
2. If you have to post anything to them use recorded delivery (now signed for).
3. If you have to deal with them, smile (it makes them nervous as all they ever expect is ire from the general public, GP). which they deserve as they clearly cant get a real job anyway.
4. Only "ever" pay by cheque.......
5. If your at fault role with the blows.
Do it properly and length should never be an issue........
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:30, Reply)
Today!Spurred on by this very question I’d thought I test out my council, the lovely Welwyn Hatfield.
The problem: For the last year neighbor dumps bags of rubbish on the street 7 days a week. One day I saw them putting rubbish out 6 days, 23 Hours and 55 minutes before the next collection.
I’ve not got a lot of the Mrs Bucket in me so I’ve done nothing about it. I can’t mention it to the people themselves because they are scum in all senses of the word. ASBOS and long jail terms, genuine sub human filth. But personally I haven’t had any problem beyond noise of the regular 3am street brawls – which I enjoy watching – and I wish to keep it that way.
So I phone the Councile and within 10 minutes am speaking to the right people – good. I explain that neighbor has been putting rubbish on the street for a year with no action from the council.
WHC: “Can we have your name and address please”
“No way. These aren’t reasonable people like you and me, they’re violent criminals who will react very very badly”
WHC: “We’ll we can’t do anything about it then”
“Your refusing to do anything about people dumping rubbish in the street unless I give you my details…why do you need my details?”
WHC: “Because we can’t do anything about it otherwise”
“Can’t?...is there a law stopping you? It’s rubbish in the street, it’s not like it’s my word against theirs.”
WHC “No, but we can’t...”
“You mean won’t do anything don’t you? You want me to trust the violent criminals don’t have a friend or family member working for the council, just so some minor issue can be dealt with”
WHC: “But we can’t...”
I work with one or two people like this in the real world. They’re like pigs searching for ‘problem truffles’ , their one goal in life is to find reason to stop doing something.
edit: Oh nearly forgot - CUNTS
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Ring Of Fire A petty, drooling belming butthurt retard., Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:25,
Reply)
RubbishBeing a tree-hugging hippy, I've been recycling my waste ever since I left home.
I've always composted anything organic and these days run a wormery as well to get rid of it all.
For years we've always collected all our newspapers, plastic and glass and taken it down to the tip (or recycling centre). We've always tried to be responsible people and were glad when the council was forced to actually collect this stuff from us.
When they first started this, they imposed draconian rules against all rubbish.
For example; my girlfriend had some cut flowers, when they died she put them in the bin. The dustmen refused to take it as it was considered 'garden waste'. A whole back of festering shit, with a few dead flowers at the top and they left it in my front garden for a month (before I had to remove it myself).
What gets me is that the dustmen act like complete cunts all year (hardly taking any of the rubbish away and when they do, managing to leave a rubbish trail all over the front garden). Then around comes christmas and you get a bunch of goons standing on your front step expecting a tip.
Fuck me, if they actually did their job right I wouldn't give them a tip, but consistently fucking up something as simple as "put dee bag in dee bin"!!!
Makes me fume.....
*has a lie down*
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 14:04, Reply)
Building controlLast year I knocked down my old kitchen and built a new one.
Having a brother as a surveyor and a mate who's a builder, it seemed a match made in heaven. Nearly everything went according to plan, the only problem was building control.
Now, my builder mate is Bulgarian. Lovely guy, comes from a nice place and is very smart and professional.
Building control took one look at him and decided that, as he was Eastern European, they would give him a nightmare about everything he did.
First, they made him dig the foundations deeper by a couple of inches each time they came round (three times). Then they wouldn't let him fill them in until more investigation had been done on the drains. Would they just refer to whatever plans they have? Would they fuck. They got builder matie to dig the whole area out for them so they could see.
It took six weeks in the end before they would let us fill in the foundations.
Then we had the same thing with the inner floor foundation, three weeks before that was sorted out.
Before anyone starts thinking that maybe my builder didn't know what he was doing, everything had already been done to building specifications (most of my family are in the trade in one way or another, so this was all triple checked).
I won't bother listing everything out, but everytime we put something up they made us change it.
Instead of two months, the build took six to complete. We spent half a year in a building site because building control don't like Eastern european builders.
Why do I say that's the reason? Because a neighbour of mine did the same extension at the same time. He used a couple of polish teenagers, but never let building control meet them.
He didn't build his extension to standard (various things like he didn't build his external walls to have an inner and an outter wall for insulaton, used internal breeze-blocks for outside walls, used the wrong render mix outside so it's now falling off etc). He never got one word of complaint from building control and was able to finish his build before mine, even though he started afterwards.
Even looking at the figures would have shown them that his build was crap. He spent £6000 to build an extension larger than mine, mine cost £20,000 for materials alone - so how does that figure?
The tossers still won't sign off my build as they want me to replace a sky-light window as they say it will leak.
The amount of rainfall we've had recently and the window hasn't leaked once. But they still won't sign it off.
B'stards
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 13:55, Reply)
Stupidity to rival Karl PilkingtonWhilst working at this place www.b3ta.com/questions/councilcunts/post85750/ I got a call to come to one of the offices of the trading standards guys as something 'odd' was happening.
When I got to their office, there were about eight guys all crowded around one of the terminals (this was back when most people at the council had just a screen and keyboard linked into the mainframe).
Anyway, when they saw me they showed me what was happening.
The guy at the desk had the keyboard on the right hand side of the desk, he would type something and it would appear on the screen.
Then he picked the keyboard up, moved it to the left hand side of the desk and typed some more. This time nothing appeared on the screen. When he moved it back to the right, it carried on working again.
They showed me this a couple of more times, whilst trying to point out that this is why they didn't trust computers as they were crappy, magical things that lived evil, evil lives.
I hated to point out to them that it wasn't magic and that the keyboard didn't have to be in just once place on the desk for it to work.
The answer was quite simple. These old terminals (vt420 if there are any old nerds out there who are interested) had a 'hold' key at the top right of the keyboard. I have no idea why they had them, but if you pressed it then you couldn't type till you'd 'released it' by pressing again.
What this guy was doing was picking up the keyboard by the corner (with hands the size of dinner plates) and was accidently pressing the button each time he lifted it. He was switching it on and off everytime he moved the damn thing, but couldn't even tell he was pressing the buttons.
I had to prove it to them as they thought I was lying, but I didn't really mind as it's now another story on a big list of how stupid council workers can be.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 13:40, Reply)
Pointless roadworksOn the A5 near Hockliffe (Milton Keynes & Dunstable) there is a set of traffic lights just before the village and as a main road heading toward the M1 and London there is a lot of traffic at rush hour.
So you can imagine my delights that the council had used common sense and removed the traffic lights installing a roundabout instead!!! Suddenly 15 mins was taken off my morning commute and the traffic near dissappeared as soon as it was installed!!!
Sadly being a council decision the joy was short lived when 2 weeks later (Yup, 2 sodding weeks!!!) they removed the roundabout and installed new traffic lights that were worse than before!!!
I stopped my car when I saw the foreman and asked what the f*ck they were doing and later phoned the council too. Turns out the roundabout was "temporary" while they ordered new traffic lights.
Most normal people would order the traffic lights then just install them when they arrived, not completely change the road layout twice in a month!
Total waste of money? Yup!
Worse than before? Yup!
Upsetting to tax payers? You betcha!
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 13:36, Reply)
Roads...This must be one of the most endearing features of local councils: the complete ineptitude shown by their road planners.
The roads in Sheffield are apparently the worst in the country, more pot-hole than asphalt, and the stupid one-way systems and bus lanes for extortionately-priced public transport merely exacerbate the problem.
Their introduction of extra traffic lights just before a railway bridge round the corner from my house has had the wonderful effect of backing the traffic right up the road, so there's a nice kind of H of gridlocked cars (the roads which it connects are so busy it's untrue). Perhaps it was designed by someone called Horatio, or Hermione, or Hitler.
I think the employees at the planning dept. perhaps sit in their offices and treat it as some sort of a board game, whilst probably looking at child-porn and eating shit from their bare hands.
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CaptainCrackerjack live trout, slow motion, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 13:23,
Reply)
Council CuntsOne of my so called mates who works for the council in the traffic department typifies the sort of "do as we say not as we do" attitude the council has towards everyone who pays their (undeserved) wages.
Over a beer one evening I was complaining that the council were making it virtually impossible for people to get to work in Poole. They keep closing all the roads that were cut throughs, so clogging up all the main roads, and putting in stupid traffic lights and 'calming' measures to slow everything down. Then the parking is extortionate too.
He said that people should use public transport to which I replied that there isn't a decent bus service, so all in all the council makes it really hard to get around the town.
Then he finally admitted what we had all suspected for years, that the council has a secret policy of pushing people out of their cars. When I said that was ridiculous he came out with a classic - "Well, people should learn to live closer to where they work!" This from a man employed by the council who drives 35 miles EACH WAY to his office on a brand new road that the council sliced through pristine countryside that hasn't changed since the time of Thomas Hardy, completely ignoring all of the local opposition. Cunts.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 13:15, Reply)
Spanish council caaahnts!Right, time to pop my QOTW cherry!
Anyway, I live in Southern Spain where corruption amongst local government officials is rife as clap in a red light district...
The local government/council have decided to put a road on their 'development plans' that runs through my garden, and this we have only just found out in the last week. So, we need to get the place surveyed, priced and the details then sent in to the local zoo (sorry, town hall)... If not, we lose a lot of f00king money on the house, but either way we're gonna have to move
Fucksocks!!!
Anyway, am not gonna apologize for length nor girth as I've never had to before!!
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 12:26, Reply)
Having just moved......my girlfriend and I have lots and lots and lots and lots of boxes and other assorted packaging to get rid of.
We've bought some new items too, so we also have polystyrene, huges swathes of polythene, all that kind of good stuff.
So we sort it into bags, fill my car to the gunwhales with detritus and head to Derby's local super-duper tip (as seen on the bbc) where we find bins for every conceivable type of rubbish:
-Old dogs? Bin A.
-Tyres and stuff on fire? Bin 6b, down on the right.
-Teeth? They'll go in bin 45, behind that fence.
That's the theory, anyway. What actually happens is that some oik in a flozzy vest tells you to put everything in the "That one, mate" (whilst pointing to whichever one he's nearest to), regardless of what it is. So firstly there's no need to sort it, secondly the bins are all mixed up.
This from a council who won't collect your wheely bin if it's "contaminated" - so if someone walking past at 3am after a shedload of beer leaves half a kebab on top of the "green waste only" bin, they don't collect it - seriously.
Hurrah for council tax!
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 12:22, Reply)
What an apt QOTW9 months ago I moved out of a shared flat in Bath, and move on in life having payed all bills and generally sorting everything out before I left.
Out of the blue I recieve a phone call from ex-house mate, shitty Bath and NE council have issued us with court orders over unpaid council tax. So I dig out the old cheque books, look up online bank statements, and lo and behold, every month a cheque has been cashed for the required amount.
But oh no, the desk monkeys at the council have no record of recieving my money, so now I have to speak to my bank and get photocopies of all the cheque to prove that I payed those retards at the council. cunting shitty bastards, and it's been dragging on on and on...
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Moonraker isn't the droid you were looking for, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 11:38,
Reply)
ring ring...ring ring...... ... ... Thank you for ringing the Bromsgrove District Council. Opening times 12.55pm until 2.05 pm weekdays. Lunch hour 1.00pm until 2.00pm.
We are sorry that we are not in at the moment but please leave a message and we will listen to it wth great interest before either completely ignoring it or taking your view into account and then doing the exact opposite. It is these decisions that have helped to bring the council into the special measures that it is in today.
If you would like to hear Julie Kirkbride talk out of her ass about how she will make this district great please press 1 and we will forward you through to the Bromsgrove Conservative office.
If you wish to complain about our piss poor attempt to sort out the refuse collection and the inconvinient times in which we collect the bins, please press 2
To talk about the huge amount of council tax you pay and the miniscule amount we actually spend on public servives press 3
If you would like to make a donation that will most likely go towards the much deserved, invitation only Christmas party that we hold every year then press 4 but please do not expect to be invited unless your annual household income is over £60,000 a year; we are conservatives and we don't mix with the likes of peasants.
For any other service that you may require from the council press 5 and you will be redirceted to the speaking clock. Well, lets face it, that will give you more information about politics than we ever could.
If you do not require any of these services then please feel free to e-mail us at [email protected] where we will take your e-mail into account before pretending that our network has gone down and we never recieved it.
Thank you for calling Bromsgrove district and please feel free never to call again
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 11:27, Reply)
In My Local Town.
The binmen turned up to a Chinese Restaurant to empty the bins and couldn't find them. So the binman bangs on the door until a Chinese guy appears.
"Hi. We're from the council and we want to know where's your bin" says binman
"Ah. I bin upstrairs" says Chinese guy.
"No,no" says Binman "I want to know where's your Wheely bin"
"Ah. Ok. I weely bin upstrairs, having a wank"
Ba-bum-tish!
Thank you very much - I'll be under the pier all week.
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Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 11:25,
Reply)
building regs and planningI wanted 2 chimney breasts removed from my house. Upstairs and downstairs, the same stack. (Double mastectomy)
Simple enough job, but the council says i need planning permission to do this. And I wasnt really bothered to argue.
Approx £1000 of the final bill went to the council planning office, where their architect had drawn basicaily a flat wall without a chimney breast there. Is was virtually a blank piece of paper.
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turb0t, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 11:16,
Reply)
BINSOh yeah,
I don't understand bins.
We have to have three bins: Kitchen waste, dry recycling and wet-recycling/landfill. These are three fucking eyesore huge wheelie bins that despoil our front garden. Ms. Lithepanther has labelled three corresponding bins in our kitchen on their swing-tops to help my confusion. From her notes:
'Wet and dirty plastic that can't be recycled, dirty paper and card etc etc'. Needless to say, I place everything in this bin.
Anyhoo... What happens if you have say, a ripped pair of football boots or some old clothes that are too fucked for the charity shop? A big bit of polystyrene from the new telly box? Where do they go? Where do you just throw away general stuff and metal?
They don't collect weekly now, which meant when we had maggots in our scraps bin, it was a FUCKING STINKING NIGHTMARE. Never mind that it probably costs more to recycle three bins than one big bin, or has a bigger carbon footprint.
What is refreshing, is that I went down the council tip and the operators there (one of which was in my year at school and gladly took my recorded videos of tv films with adverts: 'Lethal Weapon 2' and 'Indiana Jones, Boxing Day 1988' and the like which was very satisfying - bet you'd trade all this for that Wham Bar you bullied me into giving you now wouldn't you?) don't care.
'Where shall I put this? It's just general crap?'
'Bung it in this one mate.'
But at the end of the day, it's like this:
Go to China. Go to Bangalore in India. Think about the packaging that we use now compared to the past, when women were not at work and bought items daily wrapped in PAPER. Think about the amount of fumes given off by the billions of engines and then think again that a coal-power station is built every week in China. Go to Bangalore in India (Again) and you will realise that recycling as we do it in the UK, sorting a bit of card into a bin, IS UTTER, UTTER, SHEER BOLLOCKS.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 11:09, Reply)
"IT'S NOT BLOODY RADIOACTIVE WASTE YOU KNOW"Commenced work for a new small employer about 18 months ago and decided to drag them kicking and screaming into the new world of recycling.
I set aside a large waste paper sack and every Friday I'd pop this in my car and empty the contents into a paper bin at a nearby recycling centre on my way home.
Several months later, my Employers received a letter from the council asking what we were doing as we hadn't ordered any rubbish bags for a while.
I phoned them and advised them of my activities only to be lectured that I could be fined for doing what I was doing as I didn't have a CARRIERS LICENCE.
Fined for taking waste paper out of the office and recycling this myself ?
WTF ?
Makes you proud to pay your Council Tax.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 10:56, Reply)
DisputeI lived in a Gingerbread house next to a Magic Walrus. It's a nice little cul-de-sac in rural Toyland and though the houses are all similar, they are large and detached and decorated in slightly different fashions so as to fraudulently mark us out as individuals, rather than the generic mass of lollipop dwarves that we really are. Life was one endless round of Lemonade, sugar drops and candied hosepipes.
About two years ago, the Magic Walrus left and in his place came a purple Octopus from a distant land, where they worship a different wizard in the sky. In tow were his family. We welcomed them just as we had been welcomed by the Magic Walrus before.
Each house down Gumdrop lane on our side of the cherry-ade river faces towards the South. They are staggered so that the East elevation looks out over the garden of the house to its left. Obviously, when the genie made the houses many moons ago, he didn't want the occupants of the houses looking into the windows of the adjacent dwelling and its garden. However, to brick the wall up entirely with gingerbread blocks and hundreds and thousands would prevent light from entering each dwelling. The genie had a masterstroke: he commissioned windows made of opaque icicles and lemon-peel pearls which enabled light to enter whilst simultaneously preventing the occupants from seeing out and snooping into the lives of their neighbours.
This was the case for, ooh, let's say... 40 FUCKING YEARS.
This magic glass is not un-stylish or out-moded as you would otherwise imagine and in 2007 in the biggest city in Toyland, interior design types gladly pay THOUSANDS of sherbet pips for a small pane.
The Octopus came round and asked if we minded if he changed the pane.
'YES' we replied.
For two years, nothing happened, then one day, the nasty Octopus changed the window without telling anyone. Papa Tin man went round to object.
'I did it because I knew you'd object' he slyly garbled.
Because Gumdrop lane is a nice place, the genie didn't feel it necessary to place a covenant to cover the window. Papa Tin Man spent hundreds of sherbet pips finding this out from the council and eventually hd to do his own research. Consequently, the Octopus is within his rights to do what he pleases with his window.
Papa Tin Man planted a bean he purchased off a passing Troubadour and this grew into a massive beanstalk which occludes the offending window. It is legal.
However, Toyland council are persisting in that it is illegal and the whole process is becoming tedious and expensive. At the end of the day, it is people who are the problem: a certain type of person wants to work for the council in a particular manner, or as a traffic warden or wants to see into your garden.
Tin Man Jr has offered to do something v.bad with Goldilocks from down the road and he and she are confident that a few hours in the garden making little Tin Goldilocks and having a tea-party with exotic treats will be a) pleasurable and b)sufficient to have the window re-instated.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 10:48, Reply)
Organised stupidityA friend of mine has a house with a garden behind it. At the bottom of his garden are not faries, but a fence. Beyond this is a kind of lush green no-mans land of overgrown thicket, bramble, fox-shit and numberless footballs, tennis balls, frisbees and shuttlecocks that his kids have kicked, thrown and generally twatted over his fence. Then there’s another fence and then an alleyway before more houses, streets and so on. So, houses, gardens, ribbon of fence, ribbon of green inhabited by overgrown undergrowth, abandoned athletic equipment and probably the occasional cat corpse, next ribbon of fence, alleyway.
The fence between the green space and the alley is useful. It provides much-needed security, basically it’s an anti-scally measure and means that the sort of people who use alleys have to scale it if they want to gain access to the Lost World, allowing them the opportunity to sidle up to my mate’s garden fence and, oh, I don’t know, touch themselves while watching him barbeque, or poke their winkies through a knot-hole and pee on his hardy perennials.
So my mate was quite surprised to see council workmen removing this perfectly good fence. So much so he asked them what the fucking fuck they fucking thought they were fucking doing.
The workmen did not a) speak Tourettes or b) know, so my mate was directed to the council offices. There, some poor drone really earned their council-tax funded wage, as he wrung out of them that it was being removed to ‘increase security’.
This did not go down well. But he was powerless to reverse the decision, trapped in a web of fuck-wittery like a foul-mouthed Kafka character.
The punchline comes a month later when, it being council election time, a fuckwit councillor rings his doorbell and asks if she can rely on his vote. Apparently he made Paxman look like Parkie as he grilled her on the doorstep about the fence and enquired if the missing panels had been put to use anywhere else, like her back garden?
‘Of course not!’ Came the reply,
‘Pity, there was graffiti on one that said ‘cunt’. Good day.’
SLAM
‘And I’m voting bloody green!’
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 10:45, Reply)
Just don't get the ironyMy recent run in with the council goes as follows:
Our rubbish bin collection gets taken down to once every 2 weeks to encourage recycling. Being a bit of a greenie, I don't need incentives but understand how others might. I did however call the council and ask if I'd be getting a reduction on council task for getting half the service. They said no.
A week later, there's a huge fireworks display in the town centre - I called the council to ask if it was my council tax going up in smoke, and if so was it the reduction in rubbish collection doing the job? They said no.
I think they are lying to me. The cunts.
The day I see a rat in the vicinity of my house @#*$%£" Borough Council are going to have a weekly delivery of the contents onto their doorstep, see how they like it. I'll take a dump too for good measure.
(, Tue 31 Jul 2007, 10:44, Reply)
This question is now closed.