Birmingham Friends of the Earth Action Briefing June /July 1999

Vernon's World

Though I have had correspondence, I will leave the subject of Al Lone to another time and concentrate on a reality. There have been FOE volunteers leafletting around Birmingham for the last month. Here is a perspective.

Thought-provoking signs:

"No Jehovah's Witnesses or burglars."

"Angel on guard, keep off, Jesus is lord."

Unenvironmental thought: Whoever invented letterbox brushes must have hated posties and leafletters.

X Files thought: Why do some houses not have letterboxes? Where does there post go? Who do they know and how do they know? Surely these questions are worth an hour long episode. ........ o.k., five minutes, within in which time Mulder and Scully realise it is a bill avoidance ploy and hand it over to the Fraud squad.

Thought of yesterday: An Englishman's home is his castle.....well we did not have to swim a moat (a bit costly in this inflationary age), but we did come across most other deterrents!

Thought of today: A dog's bite is worse than his bark.

Spare a thought for little old ladies: Why? Two reasons:

1. After being shouted at for stepping over a foot high wall and walking on grass (some say I do the latter all the time), a little old lady beckoned me over her wall and across her lawn so I could hand her a leaflet. She was happy, I was happy.
2. While delivering I saw a little old lady walking out of a drive five doors up. By the time I reached that door she had reached the end of the drive. She turned and said: "You are faster than me." I looked at the `Save the Children' leaflet in the letterbox and the `Save the Children' badge on her lapel and said, "yes." When I reached the top of the hill I looked back and she was walking out of the next drive. What commitment, I say: "preserve little old ladies."

I thought what is reality? We had to leaflet the Bournville nation. I showed my passport at customs. They searched me for illicit drugs and illicit thoughts. I forgot the one and hid the other behind cricket on the village green. That sport is my life saver, and they let me enter. There was no need for mind bending drugs. Here was a place where front doors could be entered by the back garden and geese nested on the front lawn. There were sackfulls of sacks, full of clothes for the Rumanian orphans appeal, in every road and cul de sac. Spies from the botanical gardens were enviously cataloguing the many different species of plants. They spotted a sign: "If you grow a plant you plant happiness." I searched in vain for a drive with a half repaired, half broken car. No lawn had the remains of the month's shopping scattered upon it. Something felt strange. Where were the people? The birds twittered. The people were quiet. Is this right? Is this reality?

I had a thirst for life. Outside one house there was a twenty-four pack of beer left there by a friend for the occupants. Should I quench it? I remembered that May and June meant World Cup cricket.... thank god for that, the B.T.P. (Bournville Thought Police) could have been close by. I felt I should leave this nation in peace. As I left I remembered the beer. This was a publess nation, how did they know of alcohol? Through the ether? Would sky come down from above and murdoch their morals? Or was it too late?

Vernon