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.