Sometimes the irritations are so great, you just have to stand up and be irritating right back. So it was that I found myself loitering under an ugly new sign at the bottom of my road, holding a petition. ‘Excuse me, sir? Would you like to protest about these horrible signs? They cost £1,000 of your taxpayer’s money and as you can see they are obtrusive, ruin our view of the common and serve no purpose whatsoever except to advertise the local authority.’
I love Nimbyism. I think it is a much underrated attitude. I can’t understand why it’s so frowned upon. In fact, I think it’s really hypocritical and shortsighted of politicians to object to people objecting. On the one hand, they exhort us to take pride in our surroundings, to care about the environment, to get involved in the local community, then they come over all outraged when we start caring too much. They’re full of ideas for empowering us until the moment we squeak that we might have an opinion. Then it’s: ‘Care about it somewhere else! No Nimbyism in my back yard!’
This pernicious N-Nimbyism is getting so bad, it’s almost impossible to site a Nimby anywhere nowadays, which is why a lot of them have been driven underground. I’m not one of those in-the-closet Nimbys who lodges objections to loft conversions on the sly. I’m an Out and Proud Nimby, prepared to suffer for my Nimby beliefs.
I only wish I could get more people to join me. I would like to see a national parade of Nimbys standing up for their right to make a nuisance of themselves. But it’s so difficult to get people to stick their noses where they’re not wanted these days. There is a generation growing up now which doesn’t have a clue how to complain and interfere. If we are not careful the great British tradition of busybodying will disappear completely.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ said the first man I stopped about the sign. ‘What’s right with it?’ I said. ‘It’s so ugly and oppressive it makes me want to scream. “Welcome to Lambeth”. Oh God, it makes me mad. Aren’t you mad?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said absent-mindedly. ‘But don’t you want people to know they’re in Lambeth?’ This was an interesting philosophical point which I had to consider for a second.
‘To be honest, no. I think we’d all be better off if we pretended this wasn’t Lambeth if it’s all the same to you. It’s so much nicer round here when you make-believe it might not be a hotbed of left-wing lunatics, and these signs make that process of denial impossible.’ He shrugged and scrawled his signature. So far so good.
Lots of mothers pushing prams were outraged about the thousand pounds, on the grounds that it could have bought a zebra crossing. This was such a brilliant argument that I incorporated it into my spiel. I soon had three sheets full of signatures. Most people refused to give their mobile numbers, which was wholly reasonable. If you are stopped by a woman complaining that she can’t sleep at night for worrying about the aesthetic value of a street sign you have a duty to protect yourself. But I had not been refused a signature by one single passing individual. I had, I congratulated myself, managed to radicalise no fewer than 35 people in the matter of conscientious signage objection.
Then a pretty young girl approached. I did my spiel about the waste of her taxpayer’s money… ‘What?’ she snapped. I explained again. ‘WHAT?!’ She looked as though she was about to swipe me across the face. I asked if there was a problem. ‘Yes, there’s a problem. What are you doing about the pavements? Hmm? HMM? My father’s in a wheelchair and can’t get about because of the state of these pavements! Look at them! Well? What are you going to do about them?’ ‘Er, I’m just a person with a petition,’ I stuttered. She screamed, ‘You people make me sick!’
I don’t know why, but when you are carrying several sheets of A4 on a clipboard you cannot tell someone to go boil their head. By standing in the street with a form you’ve printed off the internet you suddenly become publicly accountable. For everything. And so, mystifyingly, I found myself looking guiltily down at the pavements, and they were indeed in a parlous state. All higgledepiggledy and uneven. I started to ask myself what I was doing about the pavements. Nothing, so far as I knew.
‘Oh, dear,’ I apologised. ‘Maybe I can do the pavements when I’ve done the signs.’ ‘Yes!’ she harrumphed. ‘Think about someone else for a change.’ I suppose it’s something else to stick my nose into.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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