So, I’m back from a mightily refreshing holiday, a fact I’m rather chuffed about, and back with a shock into the routine of real life. This is perhaps not an uncommon feeling, but with my mind returning to this blog I began to notice something a little different from the usual post-holiday blues.

I wandered along the high street to the local Sainsbury’s and noticed anew the signs of living in a “rough area”. Other than Sainsury’s, on the main trunk road, the local shops are brands associated with a high street in a less affluent area. Hardware not Hyacinths. Londis, not Waitrose. Grease on the pavement, chicken bones, litter, broken glass and cracked paving. We’d even acquired a mad busker shooting at passing cars with a banana and playing bongos to a backing track of heavy metal electric guitar.

There is no accounting for taste, but after the clean streets and municipally maintained crystal waters of rural France (paid for by fees to businesses), the thing that stuck in my mind was the litter, vomit, and grease that coated the streets of Battersea. These things are known to be signs that people don’t feel engaged and proud of their environment, attributed to the hopelessness of poverty and are an issue of class. Or so I’m told. Perhaps the patronising leftists are right to try to drag up the poor to higher level by funnelling money at them. Perhaps if they do enjoy some subsidised art they will appreciate the artistry of a clean pavement? Doubts abounded, but it occurred to me that I too live here and I am not exactly famous for cleaning my patch of pavement either, and I pay for my own musicals and take cheap holidays in posh bits of France.

I tried to think of the last time it occurred to me to clean my street. It was when stepping over one of the regularly deposited dog turds on the pavement outside, and thinking “I could wash that away”, and never giving it another second. Ahah! Not another second. A clue.

Another clue comes when you stop to consider who does look after the pavement? The flower shop owner cleaned the pavement of snow last winter. I remember seeing an old lady sweeping up once, and before I got a girlfriend I’m sure I used to sweep my pavement too. It was a different, cleaner, pavement back then. More clues.

All of those people, in all of those contexts had time on their hands. An old retired lady. A single man with nowhere better to be. A pavement that wasn’t that dirty and could be cleaned quickly. A shop owner who’s product was suddenly less desirable on account of the weather.

A theory then, for discussion: are pavements dirty in poor areas not because the feckless poor don’t want to clean them, but perhaps because the hardworking impoverished poor, and the hardworking middle-classes mixed up with them are both time poor? With Tax Freedom Day falling in May that is nearly half a year, per year, that we spend our daylight hours working for the sake of others. How dare we expect anyone to spend half the year working for others and then go home and clean the pavement too? Even if it is also my pavement, I know I don’t have the time to clear up that many dog turds, I’m too busy working. When I do have time I’d rather be somewhere else.

Taking it a step further, how many other quality of life issues stem from the imposed requirement to spend half the year working for others? An example that springs to mind is “work-life balance” or not having the time to see your own family. Is the welfarist effort to fix the problems of the needy creating more needy children by sentencing their parents to five months hard labour to pay their taxes?

It is, at the end of the day, just a thought but it’s as good a reason as any to get back into the swing of things and pick up the fight to make things better.