‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself,’ wrote Walt Whitman in his rhapsodic celebration of freedom, Leaves of Grass. ‘And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.// I loafe and invite my soul,/ I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.’
Dog walkers have complained of being asked to provide evidence of having poo-bags about their person
A century and a half later Roy Marsh, 86, was leaning and loafing at his ease by a boating lake in Skegness when he, too, interacted with a spear of grass. This spear of grass was blown into the poor fellow’s mouth by a gust of wind. Mr Marsh did what everyone would do in the circumstances, which is to say: ‘Ptth’ – not quite a barbaric yawp, but it will have to do until one comes along – and spit it out.
At once, the forces of law and order pounced. A pair of environmental enforcement officers from East Lindsey District Council, in his account of the events, appeared as if from nowhere (they had been skulking, I fancy, in such sedge as had not yet withered from the lake) and said: ‘Can I have a word?’ He was told, some will think a little pompously, that these officers ‘had reason to believe he had been spitting’, and was immediately slapped with a £250 fine.
This raises a host of chewy philosophical questions, and the odd practical one. The main practical one is how well the public purse is served, in these times of financial woe, by having not one but two council contractors patrolling a deserted boating lake in search of ‘environmental crimes’. If they can fine people £250 a pop for spitting out a leaf, and they go about their work with sufficient zeal, there may indeed be a fiscal case for it, but it won’t make the boating lake a very welcoming destination for the blameless ratepayers of East Lindsey.
A lesser practical question is that ‘reason to believe’. What sort of evidence did the enforcement officers have of this environmental crime? Were they wearing bodycams? Will they test the leaf for salival DNA? Assuming neither of those things, we perhaps see that the reason they move around in pairs: eyewitness evidence will require corroboration if it’s not to devolve into a his-word-against-yours situation. It would, obviously, be a tragedy for the rule of law in East Lindsey should such cases collapse when clever barristers, played by David Tennant, start coming up from that London to lodge appeals. There again, quis custodiet? I’ve seen enough episodes of The Sweeney to know that two cops and a perp can lead to some pretty rough justice.
But the philosophical questions are the chewier ones. That leaf, for instance. Had it made its progress to the ground without going via Mr Marsh’s mouth – as presumably it did in countless billion parallel realities – would the world in general, or the Skegness Boating Lake in particular, have been any more hospitable or beautiful as a result? Would anybody have noticed?
And even if that leaf landing on the ground really did constitute an environmental crime, was it Mr Marsh’s crime? Did he become the legal owner of that leaf – did it as good belong to him, in Whitman terms – when it happened to blow into his mouth, so making him guilty of littering when it in turn fell to the ground? Had it bounced off his nose, would the case had been different – spitting it out of his mouth being an active intervention, where owning a nose would qualify him only for bystander status? If nothing else, we must be impressed with the jurisprudential acuity of these two enforcement officers, settling all these questions to their unqualified satisfaction, as they evidently did, before the said leaf had even hit the deck.
Anyway, £250. Two hundred and fifty quid. Mr Marsh claims that he called one of the officers a ‘silly boy’, and it’s hard to demur – though I doubt that speaking his truth will have helped his case much in the moment. Mr Marsh, no doubt rather glumly, paid the fine. But he did lodge an appeal, of which more later.
Since the case was publicised, incidentally, various members of the public have come forward to complain of enforcement officers hanging round the public toilets like hyenas in the hopes of making such a dispiriting collar. Pre-crime even seems to be one of their things. Dog walkers have complained of being asked to provide evidence of having poo-bags about their person; and if they produce only one, of being sent home to get a larger supply. Mr Marsh himself was detained by another enforcement officer who saw him pull a tissue out of his pocket to blow his nose: ‘I saw you take something out of your pocket. Where is it?’ Only on demonstrating that the tissue was, um, in his hand, Mr Marsh was let off.
That appeal, incidentally. When Mr Marsh pointed out in writing to the local council – though he won’t have put it exactly like this – the fatheaded, obtuse, tinpot, jobsworth, money-grabbing effing imbecility of having a pair of plastic parkies fine an old man £250 for spitting out a leaf in a public place, the council relented. They took cognisance, in their Solomonic way, that Mr Marsh has severe asthma, stage three prostate cancer and can only walk with the aid of a rollator, and…reduced the fine to £150. Pretty big of them, eh? I can’t say I carry a torch for Reform, but if their vaunted campaign to cut the costs of local council bureaucracy ends up with the metaphorical machine-gunning of the environmental crimes department of East Lindsey, I’ll be in their corner – and everything they assume I shall assume.
