In my experience I have seen several sides of the travelling community.

When I was a child I remember we often had women who would knock on the door selling the usual pegs & 'lucky heather'. My mother would often buy the pegs or give a few pennies to them instead of buying the heather, although they would almost always insist that she take it,whether she wanted it or not. They did not want to be seen as beggars, but as genuine traders. We also had the occassional travelling man to whom my mother never refused a cup of tea & a sandwich, or maybe a few coppers. As I grew up I once asked one of the ladies why they always called at our door, when I noticed they often missed other houses in our street, & she told me that our house was 'marked', which frightened me, but she assured me that we were marked by kindness, & that travellers would always stop at our door, as they knew we weren't abusive to them. For the life of me I don't know how they knew, as I searched & searched, but could never find any sort of marking around our house. Presumably they were either the same family or group, & just remembered over the years that we were not abusive to them as our neighbours were. I also remember them telling me that they used to think that we were very unclean because we had our toilets inside our houses & washed our dirty plates etc. in the same places as our dirty clothes, something they would never think of doing.

Living in a small village, I have also had experince of the fact of a community setting up in a local lay-by for the summer & leaving the place full of human, animal & fly tipping waste, & the local council having to clean up after them. They were not moved on before they could clean up the place, but had been allowed to stay for the summer, as the place they were staying was completely unused & led only onto a small path that led to nowhere & was totally unused. The council spent weeks clearing the mess up & have now blocked off the area. Perhaps if the travellers had at least attempted to clean up before they left, they may have had a regular stopping place for summer, but now it is one more area they have lost.

While I personally appreciate that there is a vast cultural difference I am a great believer of when in Rome... If travellers of any sort, be they Roma or bus users or Brits going to foreign countries shouting at the locals 'Uno cup of tea grassee arse', then they are all just as crude as each other. Everyone should respect the laws & culture of the country they are in at that time & should do the best they can to minimise any offence. We in Britain & most western cultures do not normally defecate & leave our rubbish at the roadside, so surely the travellers are being rude to us by breaking one of our most basic codes of moral decency, just as if as a woman I walked into a Muslim temple in shorts? We should all learn about each others cultures & respect those of where we find ourselves living.

Blessings & Peace
Aggie