Pavement fouling

Our one, vivid recollection of school French classes is the text books. They used "Deirdre's Photo Casebook"-style comic strips to tell stories. Only instead of "Le singe est dans l'arbre", they would be stories about young people going shopping. And instead of turning this material in to well-loved stand-up routines, kids in our school would mine comedy from them by drawing little poos coming out of every orifice in the photos. And often, penises going in to every orifice.

We found it quite nauseating. Which is perhaps why we had so few friends at secondary school.

Walking home from St John's station one night recently, we had a traumatic flashback to those French lessons. It was caused by this picture on the pavement (sorry about the quality):


We then realised that when the Council offered to run a "responsible dog day" in Brockley Cross, this is what they had in mind. Spray painting pictures of dogs taking a dump on our pavements.

Like the artists who defaced our old text books, the person who created this stencil clearly did so with some relish. The steam rising from the turd is a particularly delightful touch. Just in case the message was too subtle without them.

Well at the risk of seeming to you as twee and po-faced as we did to our former classmates, we'd like to say: please don't try and solve a problem by creating another one. Please don't debase the public realm to tackle a small minority of anti-social people who will ignore your signs anyway. Just prosecute those people who let their dogs crap in the street.

This is another attack of the BIG YELLOW SIGNS, with added stink lines.