There\u2019s a man who lives on our street who has very good water in his taps. It\u2019s better than any of the water that comes out of any of the taps on the rest of the close. It\u2019s particularly good for making things wet.<\/p>\n
So he runs a thick hose from one of his taps all the way along the pavement, and anyone can plug their own hose into it and use his high grade water to make their plants wet.<\/p>\n
This is all well and good, except in his garden this man keeps another man in a cage, and every day, without fail, he pokes his caged prisoner with sticks. It\u2019s been going on now for months, and while we quite like having wet gardens, it\u2019s a bit much that he hurts this poor bloke.<\/p>\n
So, everyone got together and resolved that something needed to be done. Mrs Bryce said that we should all stop taking food and medicine to the caged man, because the hose-pipe brute was stealing it all anyway. In essence, we were ourselves enabling the imprisonment.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s what we did. <\/p>\n
It sort of worked but it wasn\u2019t as effective as our counter-offensive against the brute\u2019s naughty incursion into someone else\u2019s garden. That was ages ago, and we successfully stopped him annexing a cabbage patch that he had no right to.<\/p>\n
We sort of blame ourselves for all this, because we helped him move in. Mr Smith even lifted his sofa in through the window. And Mr Galbraith feels bad because the stick he uses to poke the caged prisoner is from his pear tree.<\/p>\n
Anyway, while it\u2019s true the brute was losing weight and looking a bit gaunt, so was the prisoner; more so in fact. This couldn\u2019t really go on, and everyone got even more angry when the brute stood on the hose and their gardens weren\u2019t getting wet anymore.<\/p>\n
So we made a deal. We\u2019d give the brute some food and medicine, in exchange for some of his lovely wet water. Mr Galbraith\u2019s pear tree positively flourished, even though the prisoner didn\u2019t. And the brute got really fat again.<\/p>\n
This went on for a while, and it became increasingly clear this wasn\u2019t good. We resolved to do something else, but some people accused us of only caring about our lovely wet water and moist gardens, and didn\u2019t really hear us mention the caged man at all.<\/p>\n
Lots of arguing and wrangling later, someone came up with the suggestion that the brute might have a really big stick in his house which he could use to poke Mr Galbraith. Some of us didn\u2019t buy it, but it convinced others that maybe it was time to have the brute move house.<\/p>\n
Mr Galbraith went over and physically kicked him out of the street, and let the caged man out to live in the house. Admittedly, Mr Galbraith has been a bit of a dick, insisting that he be allowed to plant some of his own pear trees in the brute\u2019s old garden, but the freed man (he\u2019s called Keith) says that\u2019s fine for a while.<\/p>\n
Every day, some old friends of the brute come round and throw rocks at Keith, but we all think that\u2019s a perfectly reasonable response to Mr Galbraith\u2019s sprouting saplings. And they\u2019re entitled to throw rocks at Keith, so long as none of them hit us. Keith is doing okay, not great. But he says life is better in the house than being in the cage ever was. <\/p>\n
We all hate Mr Galbraith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s a man who lives on our street who has very good water in his taps. It\u2019s better than any of the water that comes out of any of the taps on the rest of the close. It\u2019s particularly good for making things wet. So he runs a thick hose from one of his taps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-polithicks","category-thought-vomit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107,"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simondunn.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}