A Good Fence Makes Good Sense, by Steven Tucker

Visiting divided, Cold War Berlin in 1987, President Ronald Reagan famously commanded “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” If he’d wanted the job completed more quickly and efficiently, he should have called out Mr. Patel to do it instead.

Some incredibly depressing footage went viral across the UK this month, taken in the countryside around the village of Lower Darwen, near the northern town of Blackburn. Here could be observed a remarkably stupid young man who, when confronted by a small wall blocking his path towards a nearby hill, decided the best way to proceed would not be to walk towards the gate, nor even to climb over the feeble obstacle, but instead to stand there laboriously demolishing it with his bare hands, stone by heavy stone, until there was a hole large enough for him to slink through. A local man, Paul Walker, approached the apparent teenager, calling him a “little scrote” (besides various other good old Anglo-Saxon terms), and asking what exactly he thought he was doing. But the youth did not appear to really know. …

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