sometimes i really feel very angry about the way people behave. at 11.30 last night i came around the corner onto our street and there, from naung park, a large column of smoke was rising. something was on fire and it was not mr prothero. qingming was last week, and even the occasional outdoor joss paper offerings could not send up such a large pillar of smoke. i ran up to the park and found a bonfire in the drain beside the park. bundles and bundles of newspapers, cardboard, flyers - you'd think someone'd robbed a karang guni man - wedged compactly into the drain. i couldn't smell any kerosene, which was some mercy, and by the looks of it, it had been going for at least an hours. apart from the destruction to public property, don't these people think of the danger? in a residential neighbourhood park! oh the fire seemed fairly contained in the drain when i went to have a look but a gust of wind in the wrong direction and the fire could have spread to the rest of the park. it's a park! parks have trees, trees are woody, wood, fire, hello!? in the middle of the night when no one might have noticed for a long time! i don't know if it's teenagers doing it for a prank, or deliberate malice, but it's dangerous and stupid and irresponsible and i get angrier thinking of the extra difficult work for the park cleaners who would have to gouge out that huge pile of damp ash the next time, and the air pollution (as if the psi isn't bad enough), and water pollution (in a drain! i ask you! and the water pollution when the rainwater flows down to the canals?)

so i rang up the neighbourhood police post and after twenty minutes two scdf men came and put the fire out and a policewoman showed up a little later to have a look around. i went to talk to them and explained i had made the report but they said that it's very difficult for them to do much about one-off incidents like this. if it happened again, and it looked like it was a trend, they could keep watch on the park, but as this is the first report received, well [shrug]... which was not satisfactory, but fair, i suppose.

but what made me really, really, really angry was that there were these two canoodling idiots in the park, sitting there not 20 metres from the fire and just ignoring what was happening because it "wasn't their business" and they weren't residents, and the fire must have been burning for at least an hour before, so even if they'd been there five mins before i came home, how is it they can sit there and ignore it all, and in fact, if they'd been there longer, maybe they even saw the ppl who did it and said nothing, did not try to stop them!! and the moment the police came they scooted off so i didn't get a chance to stop and question them and ask them to make statements to the police too. and the train was still running at that time and quite a few commuters use naung park as a short cut so they must have seen the fire before i came home, but why didn't anyone call the police? why didn't anyone think it was their business that there was a small fire smouldering in the park? sometimes i really get mad at singaporeans.