Grafitti - nothing new...
Whilst there is a certain childish humour to be derived from inappropriately-placed CDCs and so forth, there has been a definite decline in standards over the years. Go to any ruined castle, find the most difficult/longest remaining staircase, and climb it. The bottom will be rife with grafitti - hastily-scratched initials, unimaginitive insults scribbled down in permanent marker. Go further up, and it thins out; clearly today's overweight, attention-deficit youth lack the patience for such endeavours. First to go are the pen crowd, then the lazy chicken-scratchers fall by the wayside. The dates get older. About halfway up, you start to see the better grafitti - carved to last in days gone by. Three quarters, you're back a couple of hundred years - and the grafitti is etched about a centimeter deep, beautifully-bevelled, with honest to goodness serifs. Serifs! Who puts in that much effort these days?

Then there's the really old stuff, like this, which is fascinating. Some wouldn't be out of place today - 8442, "I screwed the barmaid" - some runs to the boredline-poetic, nothing rushed, perfectly planned and executed - almost elegiac in nature. Then therre's item 8792 - a message from ancestral times, from some nameless, faceless denizen of the Pax Romana. He's gone, now, forgotten - his life has passed, his bones turned to dust, the world he would have known changed beyond all recognition. And yet one thing remains, his legacy to future generations; all his life, distilled to this one poignant comment - the only thing he left for us, the only way we will ever know him:

"On April 19th, I made bread".

Fantastic.

TLDR.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sat 9 Oct 2010, 13:45, 1 reply)

That was an enjoyable link.
It seems shitting in public hasn't lost its charm.
(boozehound is drinking your bar dry, Sun 10 Oct 2010, 1:50, closed)