Sometimes when a bunch of Travellers of one sort or another have been in a field and move on the place looks pretty messy - very often of course it's not so much a question of them moving on as of being moved on, and that's a major factor.

But a few weeks or months on and the field looks OK once more. But when a developer moves in, and churns up the ground, and puts down concrete foundations or covers the surface with asphalt for parking and so forth it's going to take a lot longer before it looks right.

I'm thinking of a particular little field near where I live where a few years ago just this happened. After a few travellers had been moved on they left the place looking pretty bad. It didn't take that long though, and the place recovered well, and was really pretty once more. Then the owners - who of course weren't any kind of Traveller - turned up, and put up great rusty wire fences around it, and big iron gates, and laid down concrete parking over most of it. They had some idea of using it as a lorry park, that never came off. Years later and it looks a real dump.

Human beings have a tendency to wreck the places we occupy - and we need to find a way to avoid doing that. Up until a couple of generations ago Gypsies and other Travellers were actually pretty good at passing through the world without wrecking the stopping places. Where this has changed, there are a lot of reasons, and many of them not their doing at all.

I've had obscenities shouted at me by young men with English accents in white vans, but it hasn't made me think any worse of the English in general. Of course, I have enough contact with English people who aren't like that to recognise it as being just the way some people are. The danger is when people generalise from an isolated instance, and think it tells them something that applies to a group as a whole, when it's a group they haven't had too much contact with.

And that's really what lies behind the worry some of us have expressed about this whole episode. The very fact that it seems that, for a lot of people, it's the first time the existence of the Travelling People has come to their attention, means a real danger of this kind of stereotyping. Especially when "the experts" creep out of the woodwork and encourage the process, with the cooperation of people in the media who like to keep the story simple and dramatic.

Arguing about what exactly happened in this case, and how it was dealt with, isn't really too helpful.

I think and hope that everyone who has joined in is actually agreed on what really matters - violence towards children is wrong and cannot be ignored; and prejudice and unfair discrimination and persecution of any group of people is wrong, and cannot be allowed.

The rest is details and speculation about facts where most of us, including me, really haven't actually got the facts. We're a bit like the friends who came to blows arguing about the colour of a horse - and they were in the dark anyway.