A Step in the Right Direction?

One of the things crammed into my day was the completion of another step at the foot of the beach path to stabilise the previous final one.  That suffered badly in a recent heavy downpour.

I refilled the first step with rocks and sand in replacement of what had been washed away. Then I dug the section of telephone pole lugged down yesterday deeply into the bank on one side, and put stakes in to keep it in place on the other.  After filling that step up in turn, I dug drainage channels at the foot, to take the water off the path where it has been starting on a Grand Canyon.

Let me see, now – that extra one makes it 147 steps from top to bottom.  Good exercise, and certainly worth the effort if one wants a beach with a spot of privacy!  Only monkeys to be seen. Vervets, not holidaymakers.

Oops.  I’d better qualify that in the light of the ridiculous furore created when a certain Penny Sparrow got herself into hot water by likening black beach visitors to monkeys. Her big mistake was in singling out a particular group when in fact holiday crowds of whatever hue, origin, race or religion have shown behaviour rather worse than our fairly well-disciplined local monkey troop – and the monkeys are at least cute.

If people actually do eat like pigs or turn a place into a pigsty, or chatter like magpies, or smell like skunks, or laugh like hyenas, or behave with all the elegant sophistication of baboons, then observations on these lines are valid in describing them. The trouble is that in the hysterical race-sensitized atmosphere that has been built up, one has to be sure that no particular race is the subject of such comparisons, or the criticism becomes racist rather than a deserved insult.  Even the ruling party has now started adopting a tactic of describing all attacks levelled at them for their pathetic record overall as having racism at their root.

© June 2016 Colonialist (WordPress)