O/T:- Front of my land bulldozed today

[irishpete]

For 30+ years I lived in little more than a hamlet in pleasant farmland/countryside but no amenities such as shops, dentist, doctors. Thought anyway time for a move and looked at lots of nice houses with countryside views on the edge of towns and larger villages. Most of them had "Say not to green belt development" or similar signs around. In the end decided to go for a suburban property in a built up area that could not have further development and that was to our satisfaction. Mostly has been fine in the past 5yrs.

I built on my Father in laws land, looks down into the town 3km away. Everybody knows there is a road needed in the town itself, but corrupt Councillors, Council engineers think its the bees knees, they actually want to build part of it in a built up town land. What is amazing is the County council Manager lives up the lane. 5 routes were designed. You've guessed it. Not one near his house, yet the simplest route & flat land is beside him.
Trust me I'm not finished with them yet if this still gets the green light

[upthemaggies]

Once this virus is done with us, I'm not sure there will be a need to build any more houses.

[tarquinbeech]

Thank you for the kind comments all.....yesterday was truly one of the worst in 7 years here, watching them plough over all those trees and feeling totally powerless as the digger driver grinned at me in the pic and his boss (ecologica vehicle number 70) just shrugging at me as he pointed to the sheets of cardboard they use as "sleeping mats", and assorted debris, left behind by the immigrants from last night's sleep-over as they head to Texas.....it would only have taken me 10 minutes to clear it up given the chance and nowhere near as much trash as gets thrown out of the nice new shiny cars heading south on holiday.

I am not a saint, I'm a right-winger who believes that you should look after yourself first, your immediate friends and family, your neighbourhood and country,............... and if there's anything leftover then I'll chip in to drop a few plane-loads of food parcels over Yemen....but, there were times I genuinely felt moved by the pure hopelessness of it all......

I once saw a figure crouched down one morning on my daily walk to check the fences, near my gates surrounded by a bulging pile of feed sacks, corn and maize bags....my initial reaction was a burglar on his way back over the wall with the contents of my garages, or a worker with his tools waiting for the local water company to show up to dig me a new hole for a new meter connection (I had notified them a few days earlier that the old meter had literally disintegrated as it was situated underground and flooded every year in the May monsoon rains, they needed a new raised meter above ground IMO)

I doubled back to grab one of the machetes that I keep in various strategic locations, and as I approached him, I ditched it against the wall as I realised he was harmless....he was ancient and incredibly thin.....do you remember those pics of Gandhi in his later years? all knees and elbows.
He was on his haunches, trying to protect his 6 or 7 sacks, and I could see piles of cardboard in one (possibly his bed) and a decent size sheet of corrugated metal in another which was either his roof or he was going to sell it to the scrap-metal merchants that you find in the poorer sections of the local town....very busy places, I take all my cans there.

I couldn't tell his age because when these guys spend all of their life out scavenging in the intense sun, their faces become incredibly brown and wrinkled, his cheeks were hollowed and gaunt....my Spanish isn't too good because I rarely mix in the local town but "no es en problemo, calmate senor, tranquilo" did the trick and his "frightened rabbit look" disappeared....I thought of hanging around a bit, but conversation seemed pointless so I pretended to check my metal mail box (2 have already been stolen, this is my 3rd, an old top-sliding ice-cream fridge buried in liquid concrete one-third of the way up the sides, I think I have 'em on the run!) then looked at my non-existent watch, shrugged, waved to him and went back inside.

I could hear him moving the sacks, some clinked-clanked and that told me he was collecting cans (thrown from passing cars) and gently eased aside my personally designed bullet-proof spying plate, 6-inches square, cut at eye-level in the 8 foot gates.....he was moving the sacks, two at a time approximately 10 yards and concealing them in the undergrowth (the same undergrowth that the bulldozers turned to dust yesterday) then returning for 2 more sacks.....I literally raced to my office where I store all my used aluminium cans (they are like gold-dust to the road-walkers here, 16 pesos a kilo or 60p) and grabbed a half a sack of cans maybe 100 cans, plus a litre of pure manzana (apple juice) from the fridge and two plastic glasses (the solid kind?).

By the time I got back to the gate he was on his last leg of the 10-yard bag relay and the "frightened rabbit" look returned when he saw me open the gate, he looked confused as I handed him my sack of cans....quite funny really, like he couldn't figure out if it was really his as he couldn't quite recognise it....anyway, he took it to add to his hidden stash as I poured 2 glasses of juice and gestured him to take one.
He squatted down on his haunches again and gazed into the rising sun as I sipped mine.....then he did the weirdest thing...

He suddenly became animated as if something had clicked inside his head?.....he was wearing two absolutely filthy pairs of trousers, both completely worn through at the knees so that I could see his skinny brown legs, and a huge baggy overcoat because the nights in the semi-desert are chilly, and out of the inside top pocket he pulled a huge pile of neatly folded papers, gesturing me over.
He was shuffling through them frantically, until he came to one....it was a flyer handout from the local Walmart a mile away, and on the flyer was a promo offer for juice and he had remembered it....he kept jabbing his finger at it and pointing to me, so I just smiled and nodded.....then he continued shuffling until he came to another piece, again neatly folded, which he handed to me smiling.....I carefully opened it because it looked incredibly old....it was a child's drawing, the kind they make about 3 years old, a house, a 3-legged dog, a stick-figure parent holding a smaller stick-figure's hand.....I was strangely overcome as he stared at me intently so I gently smiled back and returned the drawing.......he folded it incredibly slowly, as if he didn't want to put it back amongst the other pile of papers.....I refilled his glass after a few minutes and told him I needed to go, he made to gulp the juice so as to return the glass (thick plastic, re-usable, not the flexible kind) but I gestured him to keep it "es para ti".
Were the pics saved from his own kids many years ago? his grandkids maybe, or was he just a crazy man collecting papers from the roadside believing that they were from his own kids, long long ago? I was confused.

In truth I wanted to get away, not sure why, maybe because I haven't seen my own kids for so long now or because he might have been my own age and looked like he might not last another winter out there.....I leaned against the inside of the wall, listening to the cans clink-clanking as he started his next 10 yard leapfrog....then the next etc
Later that afternoon, I thought I could still see him in the distance (in the pics, the road here is incredibly straight and you can see for miles without the dust) and I thought of going out to offer him a bed for the night, a shower and some of my awesome onion soup and fresh homemade bread, but I didn't, and I felt sad at my own selfishness.
I have done it twice before and it never works out well, I told myself stuff would start to go missing, possibly he was crazy or on drugs, in truth I didn't want the hassle....coward.

I found the glass a few days later "on my rounds". He had balanced it on a lower 4-foot section of my wall further along the road, a section I have not raised yet, but only topped with 4 strands of barbed wire....I like to think he put his arm through the wire and gently dropped it on my side, no matter.........I thought I saw him out on the road weeks later but I was on the way to a business meeting with my interpreter named Saul.

At lunch, an hour later I snaffled a few of those free complimentary waters that they always leave on the tables in fancy restaurants, Saul and the waiters were looking at me questioningly so I told Saul about my encounter with the "old" man, and that they were for him if we saw him on the way home.
Saul translated for the two waiters and they all started laughing, so I asked what was funny and they said I was too soft, apparently the tramps around here make more money from begging than the real workers.
I tried to explain to Saul, as we climbed into his nice new shiny SUV, that he wasn't a beggar, just an old guy collecting tin cans, sitting under one of my trees staring at pics from his kids, or some other random kid that he thought was his,to him it was the same......but it seemed pointless to explain.

Saul and I never spotted him on the way back and I've never seen him again, but I hope he's out there somewhere....clink-clanking along the highway somewhere in the distance.

[navypie]

The pictures are a few hours old (I'm sure some techo can verify it).......the openly Communist government here today decided to level the front of my land and turn it into a stretch of wasteland, complete with howling gusts of white dust.

The land had been grazed by my animals, plus my neighbour's, for 3 years, green and beautiful with 50-odd trees....people used to stop and sit on the grass, look up at the sky....fall asleep at siesta time....it was part of the heaven that I had tried to create on the edge of the Mexican desert.....every day I walked along with bin-bags collecting rubbish that the complete scumbags threw from their cars as they headed south from Texas, bottles of piss, ****ty nappies, crisp wrappers, hypodermic needles and condoms....if I missed a few then my animals might choke on them.....the animals that I had saved from the slaughter-house (watch my English Guy in Mexico videos on YouTube)

Miriam said I was crazy, and refused to help.....she said that the world was a mess and me trying to clean up a few acres would never change anything. I didn´t believe her, until the bulldozers came.

Today they came to tell me that they were clearing it, apparently they have had complaints of homeless people sat here or sleeping here, some of which I had unknowingly encouraged by giving them lemon or apple juice and a plate of biscuits, and allowed them to use my toilets, wow, Tarquin the badboy, encouraging a few Hondurans to loiter for a few hours on their way north?

The truth is that BMW and Mercedes are buying up the land around me, I know this because they have been to see me and the government here is falling over themselves to help them, free water rates, no land taxes and free buses for poor workers from the town 5 miles away...they want clear and free land with high visibility......50 year-old, and more, trees bulldozed into dust so that a few multi-nationals can add a few more zeros to their bottom line?.......it makes me puke.

Tomorrow, or the next day, they will bring the bulldozers to level the rest.....in front of my palm trees in the distance.....I thought of protesting, "kicking off", throwing a tantrum, slashing some tyres, or chucking some rocks, but ultimately the government always wins and I don´t fancy a few nights as fresh meat in the local jail with Pablo-the-bum-bandit.....sooooo

I will probably let them level the next section into dust and accept their substantial cash offer to move to pastures new.....life sucks.......but I am so, so pissed off.....and coming in to read the utter garbage posted on here on other threads, by so-called intelligent people 'aint helping.
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My trees are next, the "ACI" painted on the wall between the trees are the middle letters of Hacienda, my hacienda....with their apparently nuisance trees....life is a ****ing joke
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Some on here talk a good game tarkers. You are a good man.

[jackal2]

Really sad to hear this situation, Tarkers. Your frustration is understandable. I hope your pastures new become as dear to your heart as this pasture obviously was.

[TheBlackHorse]

... Tarkers, you really do need to write that book ...

[SwalePie]

... Tarkers, you really do need to write that book ...

Agreed.

[Elite_Pie]

... Tarkers, you really do need to write that book ...

I thought he did in post #13!

To be serious, I can feel his pain. To put your heart and soul into a vision and then see it ripped away from you through no fault of your own must be devastating. Despite our differences tarquin, I sincerely hope you get through this in a positive way.

[navypie]

I thought he did in post #13!

To be serious, I can feel his pain. To put your heart and soul into a vision and then see it ripped away from you through no fault of your own must be devastating. Despite our differences tarquin, I sincerely hope you get through this in a positive way.

No need for the first line.

[Elite_Pie]

No need for the first line.

It was a joke.

Lighten up shipmate.