"LIVE MUSIC, DOGS WELCOME, STREET FOOD FESTIVAL THIS WEEKEND!, FREE ENTRY!, OVER 20 FOOD STALLS,"
Street food in the City's uniquely potentially beautiful Gardens! Live 'music' thump-thumping, destroying the peace of a sunny, June weekend in Exeter! Free entry for dogs, but dogs have enjoyed free entrance to Norny for over 600 years! Free entry for citizens and visitors and these have enjoyed free entry since Shakespeare was alive and drinking at The Mermaid but on Sunday, not free entry for a neighbour of mine.
I was witness to an interesting confrontation inside the southern gates of Northernhay Gardens. The leader of the food festival's security squad was confronting a neighbour of mine eyeball to eyeball and refusing him entry to the Gardens. Behind him, like an extended back-row, were eight of the security band. It was a stand-off, with the neighbour claiming his right to enter and the leader of the squad claiming his right to eject. There was bad feeling and worse language on both sides. My neighbour was being refused entry not because he was carrying a weapon but because he was clearly tipsy, hardly a reason considering the food festival beer tent was dishing out alcohol to every man , woman and, perhaps, child and dog in the Gardens, and because he had been abusive, but the abuse was directed at the security squad itself and at the bag-checkers whom he had not expected to bar his entrance.
The whole spectacle was not very edifying and, if I may say so, decidedly un-British.
Worse was to come, My neighbour stood his ground and, inebriate or not, his arguments seemed lucid and informed. All he wanted to do was to walk up the maple-tree avenue, find his wife and walk her home to dinner; he was sure of his rights. The security-chief was sure of his right to force my neighbour to leave the Gardens. He sent for the police.
Five very young men and a woman, policepeople, arrived with an alacrity that amazed me. It is sometimes said the Exeter police are very slow responding to trouble in the Gardens but not on this occasion.
Imagine this! There were now 15 (fifteen!) policepeople or would-be policepeople engaging one Exonian who had comitted no offence, if you except a few playful insults, and who wanted to enter the Gardens. The police, it seemed to me, were not there to try to calm the situation nor yet to take an objective look at what was happening here. They were certainly not looking for compromise. They were there, short and simple, to support the incomers, the City Council's renters, and kick this troublesome Exonian inebriate, who stood before them like Horatius on the bridge, out of the Gardens.
I was struck by the fact that not one of the police recognised my truculent, anti-establishment neighbour. He is quite a character and has made his mark in the city. I dared to wonder whether they had spent too much time sitting in cars and talking to portable telephones. So much, I thought, for local policing!
There was fierce talk of arrest and such matters but at this point my neighbour's wife arrived and did what the 'authorities' had failed to do. She forcibly waltzed him off home to dinner and left the fifteen uniformed lawmen looking somewhat nonplussed, mouths agape, that sort of thing.
Why, you ask, have I told this petty story? Well, the main reason is that this incident has led me, once again to consider the uneven balance between Exeter City Council's rights and its responsibilities with regard to Northernhay Gardens, a subject I mean to address once again at some date in the future.
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