helmets must be worn

In these changing and uncertain times, it's good to know that there are certain things that are constant, unchanging and reliable. Like the desire of certain young members (as it were, if you will, etc.) of the male gender to draw stylised representations of the male generative organ in mural form in public places, or, to put it another way, to daub giant spurting cocks on things. Here's a rather excellent example of the genre, which has appeared at some point in the last couple of weeks on a fence along the footpath running between Cooks Close and Badgers Close in Bradley Stoke:


This is on the way from the office to the little Tesco Express on Pear Tree Road; luckily I had Andy (and, more importantly, Andy's phone camera) with me today to capture it for posterity.

There is a long and proud tradition of this sort of primitive spray-can graffiti, of course. A new sub-genre of cock graffiti, though, is the super-giant cock designed to be viewed from above, ideally by the Google Earth cameras. There have been several examples of this, notably in Berkshire, Teesside, Southampton, Pennsylvania and, most splendidly of all, Hamilton in New Zealand where students have created no less than six of varying shapes and sizes - see if you can spot them all. None of them have the, hem hem, dynamism of the fence one, though, i.e. they haven't got all spunk coming out the end. Disappointing.

Obviously the best excuse is that the irresistible desires to do these things are atavistic echoes of ancient fertility symbols like the Cerne Abbas Giant - this particular great big public drawing of a cock (and on the bonk as well) being OK as it's all heritage-y and historical and shit. Interestingly, on more than one occasion persons unknown have attempted to apply a similar appendage to the much more modest Long Man of Wilmington - once rather disappointingly and once rather more impressively for the 2010 summer solstice (the photo below is of Cerne Abbas though).