Let them dig flower beds

You may or may not have heard, but there's been quite a bit of 'rioting.'
There's a lot of tough talk about, and if someone had put a brick through my window when my daughter was asleep upstairs I'd want them strung up. And I'd be right.
But 24 hr courts ? Really ? I didn't see that happening when MPs were fiddling expenses with public money.
Anyway here's a little story about arson:

'Yeah... I, erm, I was at a party and I drifted into a greenhouse with a friend, saw it was full of cacti and lit a match to find our way, as there were no lights on. The flame accidentally touched one of the cacti, which glowed rather beautifully.'

Was it an accident, then? He looks at me. Only at first, it seems. 'We did that to a fair number of the cacti. Not really knowing what we'd done.'

The greenhouse belonged to a professor of botany whose life's work had been to gather and nurture exotic specimens from all over the world. 'He'd been to the jungles of Brazil and stuff to find these cacti.'

The boys weren't arrested, because they ran away. 'We didn't know what we were doing. We were teenagers, we'd drunk too much - frankly, we did behave appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally. Next morning, one of the organisers of the exchange rang me up and said, "We know you did this." I came clean.'

The boys were taken off to see the professor, who was livid, but he was somehow persuaded not to press charges. 'Instead they created a kind of community punishment for us. Me and the other bloke ended up having to dig communal flower beds in the baking sun. Then I spent the summer with my mum, going round one specialised garden centre after another, trying to replace some of the cacti. Of course they were tiny, and his were all large.'

One of the boys, who was 16 at the time, had this to say about the recent riots:

"the priority, right now, is to punish the criminals, to get them in court and to get them behind bars."

Not digging flower beds and going shopping with your mum ?
Just in case anyone was unaware, the man responsible,why Nick Clegg the Deputy Prime Minister of course.

Of course the Prime Minister is far too sensible to get caught, he ran away early when the Bullingdon Club embarked on a spot of criminal damage.

I wait with faint hope that the government will stop trying to make political capital out of the rioting. And what happened to the business with Rupert Murdoch, everyone seems to have forgotten.