I remember a time when living close to a kids play area was a great selling point for any house. Your kids could go and play on the swings and it meant the area was family-friendly.
How things have changed. To give you some idea, I live in a generally quiet and respectable housing estate in a Suffolk town. The area beleive it or not, is considered quite “posh” by outsiders (but it’s not really that posh – just not a council estate thats all).
Our little cul-de-sac provides a quick walk-thru to the local play area, a delightful fenced-off area with colourful swings, roundabouts, see-saws, climbing frames etc. Perfect for young families, you might think.
You’d be wrong. On friday and saturday nights, as the sun begins to set, the trouble starts. The trickle of hormonally challenged teens through our quiet street toward said playground, soon becomes a steady flow, as they flock to gather in their favourite meeting place. As they swill their booze and fight like morons, their selfishness grows, and their voices get louder, and they give less of a **** about local residents with every passing glug of their white lightning.
What makes it worse is the playground is right near the pub, yeah, a great combination eh? By midnight you can guarantee there will be no end of yelling and abuse into the night air on our quiet little road, and the suburban paradise transforms into ****-******** HELL for a good 3 or 4 hours. It has been more and more common to hear the wail of sirens, and on one occasion I arrived home from a night out to find police crawling around my neighbour’s front garden (I’m unfortunate enough to live next to some of these people), they said they were “looking for someone”.
The selfishness can actually start as early as 6pm during school holidays. On one recent occasion, the invasion started at tea time and the fuckwits were already half cut on cheap cider, parading up and down our otherwise quiet street like animals, treating it like their personal playground. One of the fuckwits thought it was funny to pull down his mate’s trousers in the middle of the road, to which his mate seemed delighted, and walked down the street, cheap booze in hand, trousers round his ankles, grinning like a ****** as his friends (male and female) cheered with delight.
And to think this street is (was?) inhabited by respectable families with young children. One by one, those respectable families are moving away. I wonder why.
To and from the playground the ***** go, continuing their lunatic dance into the wee small hours, never giving a **** about people trying to sleep in their own homes.
One day I will just loose it and shout at them to be quiet. When that day comes, I’ll probably end up regretting it.
