Here are photos of the graffiti which have been placed on the walls of our house in the several years since I bought a digital camera. The one on the left is last night's effort. Fortunately it was not very large, and it was still fairly fresh. Sounds like a dog's turds, doesn't it?
When a new one appears I clean it off immediately.
This can take quite a long time, and is a strenuous and difficult task, especially in the summer. I simmer and I seethe as I do it. It erodes sweetness of character, and breeds biliousness and acidic reactions, and poisonous thoughts of revenge.
It is often impossible to remove the scribble completely. If it is not removed shortly after it was done, it gets much harder to remove. The graffiti remover stuff must be sprayed on, given a moment to work, and then cleaned off. Of course, the graffiti paint then runs down the wall. For some reason it seems to become more resistant to the cleaning chemical, and is very difficult to eradicate. The wall then has to be sloshed with water. You need to use rubber gloves, as the chemicals cause skin damage. It is probably extremely inadvisable to ingest the spray.
It is generally done at night, and I have reached the stage that almost the first thing I do each morning is to check whether any new graffiti have appeared. All too often there is. Possible the local school children do it on their way to or from school but often the culprits seem to be visiting vandals who blitz in and deface numerous houses in many streets. One night I went out to a concert and on my return home at about 10.30 pm I noticed yet another offering - so there I was in the dark, with my chemical spray, buckets and Dr P's old undies, cleaning it all off.
Our street gets done regularly. An old lady of over 90, almost blind and quite feeble, lives in the house across the lane from ours. Her walls and garage door are permanently defaced.
I don't understand why the perpetrators think they are entitled to go around doing this stuff - nor why the spray paints are evidently so readily available.
I'd love to pour hot tar on the mobile phones and iPods of the graffitists. Surely they could not object to reciprocal vandalism. Apparently if the graffiti is cleaned off immediately, the graffitists are deterred. I can't say I have noticed!
While I am so unpleasantly occupied in cleaning it off, lots of people walk past, and make sympathetic or helpful comments. Graffitists are seldom caught. Some of them allege that graffiti is an art form. Nothing remotely artistic has ever appeared around this area.
Recently a girl got sentenced to a prison term for a graffiti offence. Of course, there were immediate protests that such a sentence was barbaric, unjust, etcetera. And the usual claims came out about graffiti being an art form which most of the mug public are simply too moronic and intolerant to appreciate. That's me all right. In my view graffiti are quite simply blots and blains on the urban landscape.
