Tuesday, 11 June 2013

Odd behaviour in the neighbourhood, #47

I popped out this afternoon and happened to notice a schoolboy walk into our street. I didn’t recognise him. He approached the first car parked near the corner, lifted the windscreen wipers away from the windscreen, turned round and walked off without hesitation in the direction from which he came.

My best guess is that it was perhaps his mother’s or father's car, parked there for some reason – perhaps for a meeting, or class, on a home care appointment or visiting a friend - and the lifted wipers are a signal to mean he was early out of school and would be walking home, not waiting for a lift or expecting to be picked up. Some variation on that maybe?

But don’t we have mobiles for that sort of message, nowadays?

Perhaps it's some well established code from which I have been sheltered, announcing that a new consignment of drugs is available or that the neighbourhood is now open for discount prostitution... Jehovah's Witnesses expected at dawn? Or possibly something more enticing... Honey produced by local bees ready to distribute to hayfever sufferers...?

OK it’s competition time - there will be points for the most credible but unlikely explanation. (And points mean prizes. What do points mean?)

 

11 Jun 2013 19:32:34 | Vignettes

4 Comments

It's stress coping, to survive exams at school.

Posted by: Jan | Wednesday, 12 June 2013 at 06:39

Hello,


I really loved your latest post on "Odd behaviour in the neighbourhood, #47". I
have gone ahead and added "the neighbourhoods blog" to my Flipboard. Keep
writing awesome stuff, and I will keep reading it.

Posted by: Dante Smith | Thursday, 20 June 2013 at 05:42

thanks Dante, and Jan for your seasonal suggestion. I haven't seen another instance of wiper-lifting although I've been offered another explanation - childish prankishness directed at the known individual car owner. Not very subtle but not less credible for that. It also seems to me to be possible that the young man simply felt impelled to express his undoubted springtime virility by making the wipers project from the screen in this shameless and provocative manner.
But I'm convinced it's coded behaviour concerning the local availability of illegal resources and have been developing a theory about how the meaning varies according to the colour of the car and the direction it is facing...

Posted by: Kevin Harris | Thursday, 20 June 2013 at 07:08

He just felt like it? He was playing mucking about with peoples' cars which his friends had done and so he was trying it out? I thought he was going to bend them.....boooh

Posted by: Chris Gittins, Streets Alive | Friday, 28 June 2013 at 17:23

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Policy rushes in, where commonsense fears to tread Occasionally in my commentary on neighbouring and policy I’ve had a go at sketching out roughly how close policy and regulation can get to the everyday practise of neighbouring. Area-based league tables of neighbourliness, for example, in order to shame the less genial neighbourhoods...? Don’t snigger, it could happen. Here’s an example where policy makers have decided that people should care more for their elders. In China it has been deemed necessary to introduce an Elderly Rights Law to address the growing problem of lonely elderly people, by ordering adult children to visit their ageing parents. The law has been applied immediately: the BBC tells us that a 77-year-old woman brought the case against her daughter and the court in Wuxi has ordered the latter to visit her mother once every two months. Imagine the visits, if you will – their excited surprise and warmth after one month and thirty days, their light humour, the imaginative gifts so sensitively thought-through, the hours passing in laughter and delight… er, no? What do you mean, you think the daughter might be reluctant and the elderly mother somewhat vindictive? Hmm, one might almost think family relations was a domain unsuited to policy intervention.

Kevin Harris

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