When you go
regularly to a place its features become etched on your mind. Your subconscious
immediately notices if there is anything different long before your conscious
mind does.
case with my regular dog walk. Far into the woods there’s a little home-made
wooden cross with a crudely carved hand pointing up a steep slope to a famous
local landmark with another cross on the top. It’s quite a climb and I haven’t
quite made it to the top yet! It’s somewhere that hardly anyone goes to and the
first time I saw it I was completely surprised and touched that someone should
have taken the trouble to signal the path for fellow travellers.
The cross marks
the point where I usually turn back, taking a slightly higher path to return home
(not in the spiritual sense!) I have long since stopped looking at it closely,
but today something about it made me stop and turn. Confused dogs and one cat
almost smacked into my legs as I made the unexpected manoeuvre, but they waited
patiently as I examined the cross.
bastards!” I said out loud. Someone had written over one arm and down the leg of
the cross in purple marker pen, words along the lines of “Eli e Giu 2009” and
then something incomprehensible. I looked around for something to clean it off
with and spied a Canon lens cap on the ground. I fervently hoped that this
belonged to the pair of graffiti artists and that they were searching all over for
it and cursing their bad luck.
cap didn’t make a very efficient scraper so I used a sharp stone, tissue and dew
from the grass to get rid of the worst of the writing. Although not very
religious, I was absolutely seething and the animals looked on curiously from
their various vantage points (they were sitting by now, expecting this to be a
long job) as I swore and rubbed and swore and rubbed some more.
were finally erased and Eli and Giu were no more (I wish). The mentality of
people who feel the need to scrawl their names on everything is quite beyond
me. I remember a visit to the nearby sanctuary of La Verna where St Francis of
Assisi got the stigmata (as Alan says ‘he got around that bloke’) and the
beautifully painted stations of the cross were marred in several places by the
infantile scribblings of weak-minded individuals who thought this was a clever
way to make their mark.
back at my handiwork, the words weren’t completely obliterated but at least you
couldn’t see them from a distance and then called the animals who checked with
anxious eyes that I was OK before we turned onto the path for home.
That is such a lovely thing to write Helena, thank you very much.
PS the cross is still graffiti free – so far!
Probably poor misguided Eli and Giu’s tactless act was the only bit of fame they’ll ever get.
The great thing about their disgrazia is that you did not just walk past like most but reversed their idiocy into something good.
Someone carried the cross to that special place for you to watch over it and re-establish honour and respect.