Reverend Snuggs and the old Yew tree
There is a church on the South Island of New Zealand. with a magnificent, centuries old Yew tree.
Oh, but hang on a second, no there isn't, because the Yew tree has now been chopped down at the behest of the good Reverend.
Was the tree rotting?
No.
Was it undermining the foundations of the church?
No.
It was chopped down because in a moment of divine inspiration, Rev Snuggs realised that the tree could be a potential hazard to children.
They might eat its poisonous berries, climb into its branches and fall off, or worse - they might trip over its ancient protruding roots.
People are living in fear of the unknown.
Worse, they are becoming imprisoned by their fear of the unknown.
Our children are being bubble wrapped in a cocoon of all pervasive worry by over anxious parents.
Gone are the days when a child could disappear for a whole day and not have anyone worry unduly.
They could roam and explore and ferret out the short cuts and streams, places of adventure and secret gangs, ball games with rules that changed each second.
In the old days (as old gits say) kids played unsupervised with one another, inventing their own games, sorting out their own problems with their own set of socially devised rules.
They lived in a magical world of unfettered freedom.
Now there are paedophiles, murderers, kidnappers behind every Yew tree.
Today kids are packed into and trussed up in ultra-big-safe four wheel drive transporters, and driven to school and back, to the cinema and back, to hell and back.
In the old days, every kid in the street or village knew which weirdos to avoid, where the dangers lay because the word was out on the street.
Now there is no street for the word to be out on, kids are stuck at best inside a narrow strip of garden.
The rest view the real world throught the television.
Public parks have 'safety concious' apparatus, you can't 'loop the loop' on swings anymore, tall slides have gone and the roundabouts have vanished.
Where do children learn about taking risks, of dangers? From the video no doubt.
Children are becoming dissociated from danger, from real life by over anxious parents.
Touchingly perhaps, some children don't even know what a stranger is; they've never met one.
When asked to describe a stranger, they are always male, never female. they wear balaclavas and combat fatigues and are usually toting a gun.
Males dare not stop and talk to a child wandering out on their own.
The irony of course, is that people that do harm children are usually known to them, members of their own social networks; priests, teachers, janitors, uncles and even their own parents or siblings.
It doesn't start and stop with children of course.
Every time it snows, weather girls shrilly announce 'Arctic conditions' or mumsily advise us to wrap up warm because there's a chill in the air.
Have they ever been to the Arctic?
Americans have become obsessed with terrorists attacks on their own soil, whereas there have only been two external attacks on its home soil since Pearl Harbour.
Yet while they foolishly look over their shoulders and glance suspiciously at people that look like they may be of Arabic descent, they cheerily jump into their monstrous vehicles that are responsible for thousands of deaths each year on the roads, often without a second thought.
Let's not mention handguns.
We need to get a collective grip.
Rats are taking over, bird flu is about to slaughter us all, and terrorists are everywhere.
Perhaps they're behind the Yew tree.
Perhaps that's the real reason why the good Reverend Snuggs had it chopped down.
yechydda,