It is not often that I disagree with Ken Frost, the proprietor of the famous Nanny Knows Best.
He takes issue with a local council which threatens to prosecute and fine children playing football in the street.
I have to point out to Mr. Frost, with whose views I usually concur wholeheartedly, that there is a matter of definition in this case. He may, being a (presumably) decently-paid accountant, live in a nice house at some remove from such sources of neighbourhood strife.
From personal experience I can say that the term ‘football’ includes using neighbours’ cars as practice goals, resulting in frequent and quite expensive damage, and the term ‘children’ includes six-foot, 17-year old boys who are, according to their doting parents, likely to be tried out for Arsenal (the same doting parents, when asked why these promising young footballers did not use the council’s well-appointed football field, looked horrified and said “The Paedophiles!”).
While we lived two doors down from these people, and their two sons whose dozen or so football-playing friends came round on most days, we had two glass panels in the porch broken by footballs, and felt it wise to invest in a Scottish toughened-glass, pyramidal greenhouse, which we still have and would recommend, having seen footballs bounce off it on numerous occasions.
It is not necessarily a question of harmless toddlers being threatened with prosecution for playing with undersized foam-rubber balls. It may be a case of a sizeable group of large, usually drunk and always offensive young men, who kick full-specification footballs into any target they see fit with the greatest effort of which they are capable.
We need to be more careful with terminology. Thus:
Frost: The Gestapo in the local council have sent letters warning that children face prosecution, and fines of up to £100, if they annoy neighbours with ball games.
Underclass: The Gestapo in the local council have sent letters warning that youths face prosecution, and fines of up to £100, if they intimidate neighbours or cause damage with ball games.
The use of the term ‘youths’ instead of ‘children’, and the specification of their behaviour rather than the use of the slightly loaded term ‘annoy’ (which rather suggests that the neighbours are merely intolerant and probably elderly killjoys) have a disproportionate effect upon the reading of the sentence.
Of course it may well be that Newark and Sherwood District Council really are picking the low-hanging fruit by ramping up their anti-social behaviour statistics with a lot of tiny tots and their little rubber ball. Councils do such things, and far worse. However, though Mr. Frost does not cite the source of this report, I suspect that it may be the case that the doting parent of some hefty yoblet likely to be tried out for Newark Town, whose football practice has finally exasperated their neighbours and driven them to report it to the council, has run to the local press with this ‘poor little children’ story; the quotation from one Mrs. Heath rather supports this conclusion.
I feel that the terms ‘children’ and ‘youths’ should be mututally exclusive and that journalists who deliberately or negligently confuse the two should be sacked.
