Broken pane

Yesterday evening some yob chucked something at our window and cracked the pane. Pest!

This is the penalty for living near the town centre. But being a conservation area, we can't have shutters - bit daft really when you realise that this sort of problem has happened on and off for centuries because this was the main road into Aylesbury, and out of Aylesbury after going to the pubs! If you remove the outer rendering of a lot of the houses you find the fixings for the old shutters. But you have to argue the case with the conservation officers. House down the road had lots of panes broken last summer for several Fridays in a run. Broken on Fridays, fixed on Mondays then broken again. And kids think they're just being a nuisance and having a bit of fun, but don't realise that the old sort of glass in these houses is irreplaceable. They don't make glass like that any more.

Mindless destruction

On Sunday morning we took an early stroll around the public open space near our house. This is what the young people had left after their Saturday evening.

A neighbour heard them at one o'clock in the morning. Ten of them, boys and girls were kicking the wall attempting to knock it over, and ignored his remonstrations. He called the police but they didn't come. It took the teenagers an hour to knock down the wall, but in that hour the police didn't come.

Now the local newspaper knows and so does one of the local radios who interviewed our neighbour about what he heard. It was broadcast on Tuesday morning, the day I took off to paint our garden wall with anti-climb paint.