THE owners of an Essex farm have been forced to apologise to the good folk of Woodham Ferrers for allowing hordes of believers to use their property as the base for convention of Christian Gypsies and travellers.
Around 5,000 people turned up to the four-day “Life and Light” festival, which, according to Heather Richardson, one of the farm’s owners, got completely out of hand. She said that she and her husband Peter had found “chaos” on their return from holiday on earlier this week.
There were far more people than we were expecting or we were led to believe were coming. The majority of people there are very nice and very Christian. Unfortunately, this seems to have been hijacked on the fringe by less co-operative people.
Or sociopaths, to put it more bluntly.
Mrs Richardson said fields had been used as toilets and customers of her livery stables had been threatened.
Pastor Jackie Boyd
We feel sick and totally upset that our trust in them has been much abused.
And retired hospital social worker Margaret Wicking, 72, whose home is separated from the festival site by a small field, said in this report that numerous people defecated in or near her garden.
After she challenged one group, a brick was thrown through the roof of her three-bedroom detached home and another through the windscreen of her car.
Pastor Jackie Boyd of the Light and Life Church said more people had attended than expected and that he could understand the concerns of local people.
It’s never been this big before so it’s a problem, but a good problem for us.
Regarding claims of anti-social behaviour, he said:
If that’s true, it’s true – I can’t deny that – but we don’t invade anybody and we don’t ransack: we rent a field, put up a tent and preach the gospel.
Hat tip: BarrieJohn
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
July 30th, 2011 at 11:56 am
But, if you have no god, what do you base your morals on…?
July 30th, 2011 at 12:02 pm
Daz,
what does it say about you that you base your morals on an invisible, imaginary superbeing reported in a heavily edited book designed to give some men an easy life?
Are you telling me you couldn’t tell right from wrong without this?
July 30th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
It didn’t occur to these people that they would need to provide toilet facilities. They aren’t really very bright are they?
July 30th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Jesus would provide, you just have to ask for lav facilities in his name and they will be granted. And sometimes he says no.
July 30th, 2011 at 1:17 pm
I seem to remember a similar thing happening last year upon which we commented on this site, this attracted the xtian pikey troll Bill Boswell.
Once a year near me at the Bath & West show ground there is a bigot’s convention called ‘New Wine’ thousands of the gullible flock there. It is amazing to see how much mindless xtian bollocks graffiti these ‘good xtian folk’ leave over the place.
July 30th, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Question is: “Will the farmer invite them back?”
July 30th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Angela_K.
…xtian pikey troll Bill Boswell.
Apparently we are not allowed to refer to our retarded traveller friend as a pikey. I was accused of being a racist last time I did that.
Quite how living in a caravan and nicking stuff for a living sets one apart as a separate racial group is beyond me. I really hope we don’t have that fuckwit visiting this thread again, I just couldn’t stand any more of his ‘prove it’ shite.
July 30th, 2011 at 3:16 pm
Yes ‘pikey’ is a racist term and many travelers or gypsies share an ethnicity, not that it requires ethnicity for a collective group of people to be targeted by bigotry.
I find this whole story kind of strange. Other than the brick incident, there are practically no details of any actual problems caused by the event. People were defecating in a field but that’s bound to happen if you let lots of people turn up to a field for several days at a time. The reports of anti-social behaviour apparently include things like ‘a banger going off’ and ‘somebody asking for directions’. What? I’m not sure if the BBC article is so scant on details for fear that bringing up the usual suspects of rampant theft and belligerence usually associated with travelers might invite accusations or racism or if there wasn’t much trouble and this article really is just some bigoted handwringing over these people daring to exist and annoying some NIMBYs.
On the other hand, the farm owners seem tremendously clueless. I’d like to know how thousands of people turning up to this festival can be considered a ‘fringe’ hijacking it. And there’s the fact that their trust was breached, but it was breached by the people who presumably aren’t the ‘hijackers’ but arranged the thing in the first place. They seem just absolutely desperate to maintain their fantasy that being Christian is being good and nice despite being slapped hard in the face with two raw examples of how that is complete rubbish.
July 30th, 2011 at 5:58 pm
“we rent a field, put up a tent and preach the gospel”
Well that fucking IS anti-social behaviour, is it not?
(and have a look what your good book says about gluttony, you salad-dodging twat)
July 30th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Paul Nagle
I was being sarcastic. Regular commenters here know I’m an atheist and would spot the sarcasm; hence me not thinking of non-regulars’ probable reading of my words. Sorry for any confusion.
July 30th, 2011 at 6:50 pm
The locals are so fed up with this event that they have an online petition:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/woodhamferrers/
July 30th, 2011 at 7:06 pm
Well spank my bottom with a halibut! To suggest the admittedly pejorative term ‘pikey’ is racist is overplaying the PC card; traveller types are not of one race any more than muslims are all of the same race.
July 30th, 2011 at 8:20 pm
Angela_K said: (Well spank my bottom with a halibut!)
That left a different type of vision in my minds eye…but begs the question, baked or fried?
July 30th, 2011 at 8:23 pm
Angela K,
I’m afraid I don’t have a halibut to hand.
The offer sounds ‘brill’ but I’m afraid I am not a ‘dab’ hand with flatfish and would ‘flounder’ around, even if I put my ‘sole’ into it. I would definately feel out of ‘plaice’.
That’s the best flatfish related pun that I can come up with. Sorry.
July 30th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Oh no! Tony’s punning again! ‘Eel’ be at it for ‘dace’ now.
July 30th, 2011 at 8:51 pm
“It’s never been this big before?”
In which case, have a salad, fat lad.
Or a halibut.
July 30th, 2011 at 9:27 pm
more xian terrorism: bricks and poop mean “thanks for sharing your farm with us?” And they say atheists can’t have morals without a g*d? get real
July 30th, 2011 at 10:37 pm
This is the same Christian supremacist attitude that bombs buildings and slaughters children, all it needs is for some intellectually half-assed Christian voice to come along and indicate that anyone guilty of wrongdoing cannot be a true Christian.
July 30th, 2011 at 11:37 pm
Perhaps it was just a simple misunderstanding. They could have confused Life and Light with Strife and Shite.
After all
pikChristians have been spreading both for donkey’s years.July 31st, 2011 at 12:30 am
Daz,
And I’d thought that the pun would allow a small ‘ray’ of ‘sun’ into your day!
I was only ‘clown’ing around with the ‘damsel’
I’ve got to stop ‘rabbit’ing about fish.
Sorry to all for the dreadful puns
July 31st, 2011 at 12:53 am
Way to ignore the point, Angela_K. Hopefully no-one from the gypsy/Christian community will notice your privileged sneer as you cling to an offensive term out of sheer stubbornness and wind up tarring all atheists with the bigot brush.
I had rather hoped we were bigger than ‘the other lot’, but I do notice a frequent undercurrent of intolerance bubbling up here. Not that it’s a bad thing to be intolerant of violence, threats, intimidation, genital mutilation or whatever else various religious whackjobs have gotten into, but when people start throwing around slurs like pikey and muzzie and talk openly of other human beings as savages it puts a bit of a nasty taste in my mouth and I am concerned that the genuine and entirely justified message of anger at ACTIONS would be lost on those who would misinterpret these sorts of things as blatant hatred of PEOPLE.
Cue someone yet again missing the point and telling me if I don’t like it I can go to Saudi Arabia and fuck a camel or butt a rug.
July 31st, 2011 at 7:42 am
tony e. Oh for fucks hake!
July 31st, 2011 at 9:19 am
tony e. Ide time to mullet over, so just for the sheer halibut…
The owners of an Essex field have been forced to say saury after letting a conger-gation of cod-botherers use their land to spread their crappie gibberfish. The event was bigscale. 5,000 people (how would they feed that many?) turned up after herring about the plaice. They were there to hear the batfish crazy cobblers from the Holy Barbel, preached by the chubby pastor Jackie Boyd (a sole!).
But things got out of hand.
A neighbour, Margaret Wicking, 72, had her garden used as alooh. “It smelt bleak, what a whiff, this tench was horrible. I felt really barfish” she carped.
Morwong followed when bricks were thrown at her house and gar. Bango’s the neighbourhood.
(I haven’t used pike in my whiting cos sprats like JohnMWhite will spout pollocks about it being racist. But I don’t give a Bombay duck.)
A sea grayling.
July 31st, 2011 at 9:28 am
@JohnMWhite
I agree that we should be careful about use of language and make sure that we cannot be accused of the same kind of hatemongering that some religious folk indulge in. On occasions when I have been driven to use intemperate language, I have usually deleted it and re-written it a different way.
On a couple of other sites a story has popped up regarding an atheist appearing on the Fox channel explaining why it is unconstitutional to have a cross on a 911 memorial. The programmes website and quite a few other sites are being inundated with really nasty posts saying that atheists should be killed. In the discussions on this, some are argueing that atheists can be just as hateful, Pat Condell was cited as being anti Muslim. It was pointed out that PC is anti Islam and that there is a difference but we should take care not to give our opponents or the accomodationists and atheist butters amunition to use against us.
July 31st, 2011 at 9:32 am
Link Here:
http://richarddawkins.net/arti.....o-atheists
July 31st, 2011 at 11:50 am
Remigius
Enough of the turbot-charged punnery. I usually a-dory puns, but this is like a bad bream.
July 31st, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Sorry MrGronk. It was shellfish of me, but I had spent ages sea urchin’ on Google…
July 31st, 2011 at 3:58 pm
JohnMWhite
And you miss Angela_K’s point, I think. She does say that the term is pejorative, merely not racist as gypsies and travellers aren’t of a single race.
On a lighter note: Just woke up and not had me three gallons o’ coffee yet, and I can’t think of a single fish-pun; so here’s Tennessee Ernie Ford.
July 31st, 2011 at 4:23 pm
God Almighty, Daz, that takes me back a bit. He’s another one who was very popular with the evangelicals because he sang a lot of religious songs, even though he was an alcoholic! Anyway, perch yourself on your chair and listen to this (and don’t carp on about it):
http://youtu.be/McSm0iBKkYM
Magic!!
July 31st, 2011 at 5:28 pm
Ah well, if we’re going to start on old comedy: Keep Britain Bona.
July 31st, 2011 at 5:46 pm
I didn’t expect to start this fishy nonsense. Look what happened to the chap who said “That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.”
JohnMWhite, I still don’t see how you or indeed others could say that the label ‘pikey’ is racist; perhaps you could explain how you determined this. By your logic, someone calling people like me a Dyke [pretty inoffensive] is somehow deemed racist. Is there a Stasi like black book of proscribed words collated by and only known to the multicultural marxists of the hard left and Guardianistas, so they can scream racist any time one of these words is used?
It would be great if we could maintain the intellectual and moral ground in attacking religion and certain abhorrent cultural practices but it doesn’t always work; sometimes we have to get down to our opponents level and get our hands dirty. There will always be sections of humanity who are quite happy to dwell in their cesspit of ignorance and do their best to drag everybody else down with them; reasonable debate doesn’t work and appeasement merely emboldens them. Homo-sapiens the 9/11, 7/7 bombers and practitioners of FGM may be, but they are by their actions, savages and barbarians by any reasonable person’s definition.
July 31st, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Fish Joke.
A priest is out fishing one day with a sailor when he catches a big one.”Look at the size of that fucker” says the tar.”Language my son” says the priest. Thinking quickly the sailor replies “No father you don’t understand,that’s a fuckerfish.”The priest later gives the fish to the bishop and tells him of the type of fish it is.The bishop is having the pope round for dinner and asks one of the nuns to prepare it for cooking,after explaining to her the type of fish it is.
On finishing the evening meal the pope remarks on the fish and how much he’d enjoyed it which started a bragging contest.
“I caught that fucker” said the priest.
“I prepared that fucker” said the nun.
“And I cooked the fucker” said the bishop.
To which the pope leans back in his chair takes a drag on his cigar and says, “I’ll tell you something,you c*nts are alright.”
July 31st, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Dab (sorry, Daz) I didn’t really get the fish connection – even if politicians ARE pretty slippery customers at time!
July 31st, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Barriejohn
Nah, I’d moved on from fish. I was just sorta freewheeling through YouTube, and I’ve always loved Julian & Sandy. Here’s another 50s Christian favourite, though. Jim Reeves.
(Kind of odd – I was talking to a chap of Caribbean parentage (his parents came over on the actual Windrush) and he was saying Reeves was a favourite of the Caribbean immigrants, too.)
August 11th, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Can someone please tell me if any arrests were made? And if so how many?
Thank you.
August 11th, 2011 at 11:24 pm
An 11-year-old girl charged with criminal damage following disturbances in Nottingham has been given a referral order by magistrates.
The youngster, from Nottinghamshire, appeared before a court in the city where she admitted the offence, and a charge of attempted criminal damage.
She was arrested on Tuesday evening after smashing windows at a New Look store in the city and attempting to break windows at a Flannels store at around 11.30pm.
She was with a group of around 15 others at the time, a police spokeswoman said.
The girl was given a nine-month referral order by magistrates.
(GYPSY CHILDREN ARE TUCKED UP IN BED – WHAT WAS HER PARENTS THINKING? MAYBE THEY WERE AMONG THE RIOTERS – TOTAL DISGRACE)