Perfect place to get this off my chest....
My mum has a really nice B&B in Mid Wales... old stone building in a really nice little welsh market town. It's kind of a great example of what makes Britain look so darn beautiful.... I live in the USA these days and when I pop back every now and then, I just really realise what I'm missing.
EXCEPT... last Friday night, a bunch of pissed-up, brain-dead pondlife decided to sling a fire extinguisher through my mum's front window. Completely smashing it of course, along with the original old frame, plus a teapot collection my mum had collected over the years, one of which was a really nice china one which was around about the only thing my mum had left from my nan, who passed away a few years ago.
Now my mum lives alone (obviously unless there are guests, which there usually are except unfortunately this night), so you can imagine how scared and upset she was. And here's me, sitting 4,500 miles away, can't do a sodding thing about it.
And that's why I'll probably never go back to the UK to live long term. When I lived there, I had a nice house, in what is supposedly one of the nicer places to live - having worked my f*cking arse off to get a foot on the ladder in life. But every week, some little wanker would set fire to something, throw a brick through my car window, throw paint on stuff, steal plants, rob my garage, and this happened constantly to me and my neighbours. I think I became desensitized to it, but looking back, I'm amazed I never thrashed one of the little tw*ts to with an inch of their lives.
You can say what you like about America with it's so-called crime culture, guns, and what have you... but where I live, I can literally leave the door open, nothing bad has happened since I've lived here... not one, single solitary bad thing, and that's nearly 5 years.
It's such a cliche to say "what's the world coming to", I'm not quite old enough yet... but the tragic thing about the UK is that it is a beautiful place with some amazing, generous, kind people. But it's this small minority of cretins who won't be happy until they're smashed up every single phonebox, bus stand, you name it.
And as for what happened to my mum... I don't know if I'm more sad or angry, but I know it's effing frustrating...