P.S.T. (2)

Picture if you will, an idyllic summer's afternoon at the park.

Due to an unfortunate collision of circumstances and timetables, I find that I'm on annual leave at the same time as the builders are knocking seven shades of shale out of my house. This means that I'm better off getting out of their way for the duration and, because it's a nice day and I've done just about everything else on my day's "stuff to do" list, after lunchtime, I head off down to the country park for a few hours.

Well, it calls itself a country park, but it's not really in the countryside, if you know what I mean...?

Anyway, the sun is shining, the waterbirds are swimming, the remote controlled sailing boats are floating quietly by, and there's ice cream to be eaten. All is well in my world and, really, what could be more perfect?

Then they arrive...

Another family from hell.

With their bellowing, and their buggies, and their replica sports shirts, and their car door slamming, and their screaming offspring who seem to number in the thousands of despite there probably being less than a half dozen of them, all dropped like an atom bomb into the peaceful tranquillity of an ordinary afternoon.

Most of it I could tolerate...

The shouting and the arguing and the running about is mostly down to the youthful exuberance of just being outside, and the lessons of how to behave so as to not upset and disturb other people is one which can only be learned by observation and experience, but the last straw really came when they started to amuse themselves by abusing the birds for "A bit of a laugh..."

Those five words... "A bit of a laugh..." have caused so many crimes against humanity...

Because it was all really, really funny...

At least they thought so.

I don't know... Perhaps I am getting more intolerant as I get older, or perhaps I just fail to understand what "fun" actually is, or maybe I just get so very easily disappointed in, oh I don't know, people and the general lack of standards they seem to display nowadays, and the lack of care they show the world in general and the creatures they share it with in particular...

Perhaps I was most disappointed by the fact that the ring leader, the one showing an example was the male parent because I knew that by his demonstrations of (perhaps only mild) cruelty, he was teaching future generations to be equally nasty.

Oh, it wasn't much. A mere trifle you might think, really nothing to be concerned about but, once they noticed how the birds fought and flapped over the bread that they were feeding to them, whole slices of white bread thrown were with glee and look how hilarious it was to watch them squawk and fight over them.

Ha bloody ha...

I'm not even entirely sure that such large chunks of processed bread are even all that good for the birds. I seem to remember that it can swell up and choke them, but I'm sure that, for a few moments of hilarious entertainment, the health and well-being of a few water birds is a small price to pay.

Such people will inherit the earth, you know.

Submitted for your attention, in the P.S.T. Zone...