Will that caped vigilante come in to bat for us?

Quote of the week comes from veteran broadcaster Chris Morris and is on the subject of vigilantism: “In Gotham City in the United States they call up a specialist vigilante agent when they are in times of real trouble by projecting a huge luminous emergency bat sign into the sky. He comes rushing in and so far that has worked.”

Judging by some of the comments below the Kentonline story about Canterbury City Council’s purchase of half of Whitefriars shopping precinct, there is a good deal of misinformation circulating.

The most unfair complaint was that it was somehow being done at the same time as the council tried and failed to get its hands on 147 former military family homes at Howe Barracks.

The two are completely unconnected. Firstly, the council put its bid for the homes in to the private owner in November. It later found out that the London Borough of Redbridge had beaten it.

Secondly, the council only became aware of the Whitefriars opportunity in April and then started beavering away on getting it sorted.

The purchase is being funded for the most part by a loan for £74 million of the £79 million price. This comes not from a private lender but from a government body that provides money for specific local authority projects.

With local government funding set to shrink to pay the nation’s debts, the government is encouraging councils to find ways of raising income themselves.

What Canterbury City Council has done is an eminently sensible and reasonable investment in the future.

Does anyone know why weird yellow markings have appeared on the A290 between Canterbury and Whitstable? There’s about six of them on either side of the road somewhere around Pean Hill.

Joke of the week comes from Howard Rowles, of Dover Street: “My friend Gav died from heartburn this morning. I can’t believe Gaviscon!” With the regularity of a metronome, my phone will bleat or shiver – depending on what setting I have it on – to alert me to a new post on a Facebook page called Canterbury Grot-spots.

This is a page set up to identify problem areas of litter and flytipping. The content is almost always the same: bin bags massed in a pile, some with rubbish spilling out into the road; supermarket trolleys abandoned in alleyways; rage at young people in education called ‘students’… and so on.

Conceived by Cllr Oliver Fawcett as a way to tackle persistent issues of mess, it can count some successes and, put to the right use, is a force for good.

The Friends of Kingsmead Field, Cllrs Alan Baldock and Terry Westgate, Prof Richard Norman at St Michael’s and Helly Langley, the solo antilitter crusader who clears up wherever she feels the need, all make sensible and constructive contributions to the page.

However, the page’s admirable initial aim appears increasingly to have become subverted or even warped.

The problem with Grot-spots is not what it sets out to, and indeed does, achieve, but the by-products it creates.

For some it is simply a cudgel with which to thwack their sworn enemy, that great Satan Canterbury City Council and its litter contractor Serco.

It is a weapon of revenge against our local authority that must continue to be punished for imposing the Westgate Towers traffic trial, the city council’s version of a crime against humanity.

Now go to the page and imagine, if you will, that you are a casual visitor who has chanced upon it when looking for information about Canterbury.

There you will find a perpetual (and selfperpetuating) list of indictments against Canterbury and its inhabitants, plunging the city’s good name repeatedly into the toilet.

This destination of pilgrimage and seat of faith, tied as it is to the Crown and our glorious past, this tourist Mecca, this centre of educational excellence, is reworked as a version of hell, Grot-spots advertising the dirt and grime and rubbish for all to see.

We ought not to be afraid to recognise that there is something perversely intoxicating in focusing exclusively on the warts and the scabs, an attempt to find the worst of our species and flaunt it for all to see.

Those like me who work in newspapers can’t pretend we don’t do this.

But, worryingly, Grotspots spreads before the visitor a landscape ripe for the identifying and hunting of scapegoats: working-class slobs, feckless youths, the lazy and the great unhosed, “bloody students”.

We can’t avoid the reality that there are areas of untidiness, that there is litter and that rogues fly-tip instead of properly disposing of their trash. What we can avoid is amplifying and magnifying these issues out of all proportion, an ultimately counter-productive betrayal of the page’s original purpose.

And we can learn to acknowledge more readily the efforts of those working against mess.

That includes volunteer litterpickers, our own city council and the organisations that affectionately promote civic pride, such as the In Bloom competitions.

But for some, endlessly talking down the city, its council and its inhabitants is not a step on the road towards improvement but has grown into a purpose of itself.

Consider this comment that appeared on Grot-spots two weeks ago: “I think Canterbury in Bloom is a sick joke set alongside the gallery of photos on this page which cover almost every residential district in the city.

“The city of Canterbury consists of a lot more than the Whitefriars, Cathedral Precincts, Westgate Parks, Abbots Mill etc etc as nice as they are.”

A competition that encourages civic pride is dismissed outright on the basis that some parts of the city – namely, those with high concentrations of people in cheap accommodation – are less tidy than the heavily litter-patrolled city centre and beauty spots.

There is no point rising to celebrate the better and the best when there is a worse and a worst – an argument that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Canterbury, so the argument runs, should deny itself feelings of pride and must instead punish itself by viewing the pornography of rubbish on Grot-spots.

The page does nod towards the successes, the litter-picks, the anti-rubbish initiatives and ideas for the future.

But judging by the interest of visitors, their attraction is limited. People fully clothed behaving decently isn’t what they have come for. They crave the filth.

To someone who is not a frequent visitor to Grot-spots, it feels as though the quest for the next salacious picture of detritus, the next shocking image of the human disease that infects this city, is its real purpose. “Sicker! Dirtier! Lead me to the most disgusting trash, the filthiest people!”

If mess and litter were suddenly to disappear from Canterbury’s streets, those most addicted to the Grot-spots page would doubtless feel a void.

Deprived of their choice narcotic, they would need to find another outlet for their commentaries on the decay, the disease, the dirtiness of their fellow citizens.

In other words, Grot-spots has come to be not merely a page to broadcast scenes of mess with a view to getting it cleaned up but a place where one can relegate his neighbours to the status of pigs – unworthy even of the adjective ‘human’.

It is a way of registering the rapacious, all-consuming gluttonous hell on earth of modern society.

As a famous Frenchman once said: “Hell is other people.” It sure is if you follow the Canterbury Grot-spots page. The American writer and heroic Anglophile Bill Bryson once remarked that one of the things that so attracted him to us when he first came here in the 1970s was that we derived such pleasure from small things – a sunny day, a lovely cup of tea, a pint of foaming nut-brown ale.

It was with a mug of ale in his hand holding court at the Red Lion in Stodmarsh that I first came across Robert Whigham, its former landlord who died on Saturday.

Robert was one of the people who regarded his job as simply making other people happy, performing a succession of little things whenever they visited the remote country pub.

Later in his life, Robert would come to enjoy those little things himself.

I would often meet Robert and a retired policeman friend of ours at the Miller’s Arms in St Radigund’s, where we would chew the cud with its excellent landlord Paul Henderson.

Robert’s voice had become distinctly softer of late and he had replaced the ale with red wine. He loved the tipple and he loved the chat.

Looking back a few months, I now think how happy we all were in each other’s company.

That is the simple pleasure of the pub and social drinking.

Charlotte, Robert’s daughter, has invited everyone to raise a glass to him. As soon as I get the chance I’ll pop back to the Miller’s and get myself a glass of Robert’s favourite red.

My first encounter with Robert was at the Red Lion on Christmas Eve 2000.

I’d gone out there with members of the Tophill clan after a heavy afternoon on the sauce and I was in need of sustenance.

“Can I have a bowl of chips, please,” I asked.

“Chips?! Don’t do them – never have done, never will do.”

My friends look at me with daggers over this monstrous faux pas.

Chris Morris