coun
PublicHouse
I was born and bred in this city. I learned to walk and talk under a ceiling of toxic black cloud that visited twice a day and only slept when the rest of us did. The local grocer stocked my favourite sweets and I fell in a kind of pre-pubescent man-love with him when he operated a don’ t ask – don’ t tell policy when I tried to buy ciggies on my twelfth birthday. He coughed his way to an early grave, clocking up emphysema before he gathered a half-century in earth years. He occupies iconic status in my mind. Only the great die young.
Of course there are other things I love about this place. The City Hall, oblivious to its own aesthetic limitations, has clung tenaciously to quasi importance for every decade of my life and a few before that, asking little in return except perhaps something in between pity and admiration, like an ageing grandfather on his last legs. The football teams, the Saturday markets, the charity collectors, the kids high on weekend leave, the foreigners running eateries with scents that reach out like beckoning fingers. I’ ve grown up seeing something new every other day and devouring every granule of it. I met my first girlfriend in this city, fell in love for the first time. I drank my first pint, ate my first kebab, puked over another human for the first time. I got my driving test in this city, picked up my first dole cheque, got my first job. But this city is a changing place. Love can turn to hate. Actually, that isn’ t correct, it is people that turn love to hate. Somewhere along the line of time individuality died and the council took its place.
Council is a hard word to define. Look it up and you don’ t get the actual truth, you get a sanitised, holier-than-thou interpretation of what some OED editor thinks it should be. I fancy myself as a much more thorough, honest lexicographer. Here’ s my attempt.
Council:- A group of largely unelected, self-nominated pen-pushers, proficient in completion of expense sheets, re-hashing old ideas to maximise‘ revenue streams’ and extracting every single available penny from fearful, law-abiding citizens.
– A body of alleged human beings, supposedly incarnated and employed for the greater good, either under-educated or with degrees in the field of chicken-wire twisting or crayon-testing, incapable of innovation or implementation of policies that don’ t cost the taxpayer money or punish contraventions( again of taxpayer) with excessive fines.
– Consisting of life forms that could loosely be described as hybrid mutations somewhere between pugnacious feline bequeathed with an unnatural sense of entitlement and house dog with little else to do but lick its own balls.
– Bunch of tubes.
In my city you can’ t take a dump without getting fined. I’ m not advocating street defection, I’ m alluding to the fact that if you miss your rates bill, you can expect your pipes to run dry and your feces to sit where you left them, until you get so sick of the stink that you scurry down to city reception and pay your
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