Not happy, Jan!

Right, there are a few people with whom I am Not Happy. You know who you are. I'm giving you all a very, very hard stare.

This, as you will have noticed, is a cemetery. It's a lovely old churchyard at Magill in Adelaide's eastern suburbs. It dates back to the 1840s and it has some beautiful old headstones set among olives, pine trees and agapanthus.

In the foreground of the picture, you can see a gravestone. It belongs to my great-great-grandmother, my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather. Can't read the names? That would be because some wretched little swine decided to kick it over a few nights ago. Luckily, it's not broken, because it's made of fairly sturdy marble, but if you look in the background you'll see some that are. The older, thinner, taller stones and the ones made of slate didn't fare as well. I didn't count exactly how many graves had been desecrated when mum and I went out to look at the damage this morning, but there were at least a few dozen.

While we were standing there, an older lady wandered over to ask whether this was the cemetery that had been desecrated. Er, yes. That would be why we're standing in front of a kicked-over headstone. I fought not to say something about Captain Obvious while Mama Cap said, "What's the matter with people these days?" The lady said, "Oh, I can tell you right now! They don't believe in God!" There was a clamping/grinding sort of noise, as Redcap the Atheist bit her tongue and spat out a platitude or two. The lady trotted off, surrounded by a cloud of righteous anger.

A few minutes later, a pair of well-intentioned young rubberneckers appeared. "Oh, isn't it terrible?" Er, yes. "Is the stone heavy?" Er, yes. But they were actually offering to put their muscle where their mouths were and to help right it, which was nice of them. We had already decided that it couldn't fall any further, so it was better to leave it for the monumental masons to pick up when they cement it back into place.

But ooh, I'm angry. I don't want to hear any of that usual old rubbish about disaffected youth and blah blah blah. For Ford's sake, get a hobby! Read some Dostoyevsky or Salinger or something and rage against the dying of the light/the machine/the bloody Howard Government.

Grr.