The rise of the village poo-painters

After they banned horses from the village green and surrounding common land, I set about trying to find out why, for it seemed such a strange thing to do.

Forbidding dark green signs saying ‘No Horse Riding By Order Of The Parish Council’ marked every track running through 30 acres of public land, while the bridleways in the nearby woods were almost permanently blocked with fallen trees.

One day, a girl did ride her horse across the green, leaving a dropping outside our house. We watched amazed as our neighbours, the vegans, came out and photographed it, then, after shovelling it away, they knelt down and used tweezers to pick up the last fragments.

I realised that horses were banned so that the Surrey-ites did not have to confront reality, preferring to buy processed manure in bags from the garden centre.

The other day, while walking my dogs, I noticed some bright fluorescent pink patches on the green. Bending down, I realised that someone had spray painted dog poo. To me, this felt a bit like when those suburban weirdos put poo in a plastic bag, then place the bag carefully on the ground, for the poo-removal fairy. I always conclude that I would much rather have just trodden in their dog mess, on the basis that poo biodegrades, whereas a plastic bag won’t.

I stared at the pink sprayed turds and wondered at how some artistic, community-minded soul had taken the time to paint poo rather than clear it up. I supposed that by spraying it they sought to embarrass the poo leaver to effect a permanent solution.

But the poo leaver had gone, and if he or she walked that way again, instead of seeing poo, there would be a pretty pink patch. Either they would make no connection, or they would think: ‘So what? Someone has painted my poo.’

It is not a goer, this idea that a person who leaves dog mess behind sees it spray painted and thinks: ‘Goodness! I must never let my dog do that again, for truly the shame of seeing it painted pink has made me realise the error of my ways!’

No, they shrug and think: ‘No one knows that was me. Go on, Fido, have a good old go again when no one is looking. This lot round here are bonkers and they deserve everything they get.’

I walked on and saw two or three pink patches, all in the long grass where the village green meets the undergrowth. Evidently, the poo sprayers had not been able to find some really good examples, and had been reduced to spraying dog mess they had to search for, bent double, foraging through the long weeds. Were they doing this by night, with a torch, or during the day, as people watched, like performance art? Did these people not have anything better, or more daring, to do?

In any case, the parish magazine proudly announced the development of this group. It was an official thing: the village poo painters. The idea was ludicrous. I did not take it seriously. Yes, I poo-pooed it. Until I came out of my house one morning to find they had sprayed a pink circle round an offering almost outside my front door.

‘I hope people don’t think that’s mine!’ I fulminated. The builder boyfriend said: ‘Who cares?’ ‘Well, it’s defamatory,’ I said. ‘It looks like I’ve been poo-shamed! Do I pick it up, when it’s not my dogs’, or do I leave it there, like a scarlet letter?’

We walked the spaniels and found that the pink patches had otherwise not increased. The problem for these poo painters, we decided, was that either the poo was out of control, in which case they were going to have to spray paint the whole of the village green pink, which hardly made the place look better than if it were carpeted in dog mess.

Or there was not really a problem, in which case they were only going to be spray painting one or two poos every now and then, to no great effect, which was what had apparently happened.

‘It’s Labrador-sized,’ I said to the BB, staring at the pink poo outside the house again. ‘Or possibly that Alsatian the old woman walks past our house every night with a torch tied round its neck.’

The next day, the BB and I arrived home and were getting out of the car when I saw the wife of one of the village organisers walking her dog. As we stood there, the dog stooped. And she walked on, talking into her phone, or pretending to.

‘Did you see that!’ I hissed to the builder b. ‘I can’t believe it!’ But he was of the view that this was the most predictable denouement imaginable.