Growlin' bout them dirty little brats!

Today the guy next door threatened to call the coppers on the mob of kids that run riot up and down our street. It's school holidays (Easter), so there are more of them than usual and they are running amok more than usual. Who would let their children stay with the Angry Family, where most but not all of the brat-pack live, is a good question, but it's one that is better addressed to DoCS than to me.

The cause of (deidentified neighbour)'s frustration was that the kids had built a cubby in his front yard while he was out, then trashed it. Unfortunately the trashing involved wrecking a large wattle and dropping the branches on top of some young shrubs, causing extensive collateral damage. And of course, all kinds of wrappings and containers and crap had been spread from arsehole to breakfast- the kind of mess that I have to clean off my own footpath at the end of every weekend.

I've been strategically tolerant of them so far- I win some of my skirmishes with them and lose others- but I am sick of their loud swearing and violence towards each other and rock chucking and insolence and malicious damage and colonisation of our footpaths and driveways and front yards. Cranky old bugger that I sometimes become, I have found myself channelling my dead father by half-wishing that a big truck would come round the corner too fast and collect one while they play (more often they just sit) unlit, in the carriageway of the road after dark.
But be careful what you wish for...
And after all, they are just little kids.

More often, I wish that a respected Elder would turn up and have a word to the Angry Mother, or that someone would turn up early in the morning and drag off the Angry Father, and that one or both of those things would actually have an effect on the parents' custodianship of their children's behaviour. Because I'm pretty worried about what that behaviour is gunna be like by the time they're 14.

When I drove in after a pleasant day out with my niece and her baby, I noticed that my letterbox (which I repaired two days ago) had a brand new big ding in it. As the sun went down, and I was hanging out in the front garden, positioning some new pots we'd selected, I saw Angry Girl (aged about 10 or 11?) beat the crap out of her own letterbox several times with a large steel bar. It made a huge racket, but no-one responded.

Both her adults were home.