leaving sale

"I think this year's going to be bad," she says as her children play on the rug. End of the afternoon. The sun dapples on the freshly-cut grass. Kids swing on the home climbing frame to the chink of wine glasses. Idyllic, non? "You know, that man you told to clear out of the playground M?" She turns to a friend. He was selling pirated DVDs inside the walls of a local playgroup. M, a mother of two, had asked him to move. "He said, you're racist. He said he's a war veteran - " "Rubbish --" says M, who's hosting a leaving sale (crockery, tired baby towels, crocheted blankets, braziers: how many of these sales have I attended willingly or unwillingly in the last 10 years?) -- "He's not old enough." "But that's what he said," she insists. "And he said: just wait for the elections. We're going to sort you whites out." It's there so often on both sides, that hatred, so near the surface, waiting for the trigger.