Yesterday afternoon, myself and another of the guys from a flat in my block were doing some gardening in the plots around the building. We'd undertaken a fair amount of pruning/mess making when three local teenagers jumped over a nearby wall. I'd seen these kids playing in the nearby building site before and was keeping an eye on our tools as I worked.

They cautiously came over and were interested that we'd been cutting back the overgrown shrubs with a saw. They'd clearly not seen a handsaw before, but in any case offered their services as "we're not doing anything anyway." They were great, and made light work of clearing up the mess that we'd taken about an hour to create.

It made me think that often (myself included) some people are quick to deride the kids hanging around on the street - but in reality if there were organised things (and there may well be, but obviously these kids seemingly aren't going to them) for them to do that gave them something to do - our community would be richer for it.