Some graffiti appeared near my home recently and it struck me that they were of a kind I hadn’t seen for a while. Almost the next thought that came to me, an act of off-the-cuff classification, was that there are three types of graffiti.
The English countryside was once a refuge for writers and artists of slender means. The life was peaceful, the air was fresh, and the rents were cheap. But like exotic plants transplanted to alien soil, they brought their own peculiarities to their new habitat. And they could arouse suspicion and sometimes loathing in the natives.
Abandoned shopping trolleys are everywhere once you start looking out for them, littering the streets like grimy analogues of the sun-bleached skeletons of imaginary deserts. What do they signify, these forsaken machines of the retail hunter-gatherers?
