Vigilantism is not a good idea, especially for the chronically dim-witted.

We have an elderly widow living next door to us; a small, frail 81 year old lady who lives on her own. We do our bit to be good neighbours and see that she is alright without intruding.

A couple of nights ago someone took it upon themselves to daub paint on her front garden wall. It was a cowardly act carried out by a stupid person. The evidence for this is three-fold.

• The message was unintelligible. It looked like "A PERV LIVE", my best guess is that it was supposed to say 'A PERV LIVES HERE' but the moron who did it ran out of wall.
• The paint and brush was left behind. The brush handle was covered in painty fingerprints.
• Most mind numbingly stupid of all - they quite obviously got the wrong house.

Luckily we had spotted it by 6:30am so we covered it up and rang the police. I didn't expect to get much of a response and to begin with it looked like all we were going to get was a follow up phone call.

After I explained what it said and told them the age of the victim they became much more interested. We had a visit from a couple of policemen followed by the Scene Of Crime Officer (SOCO). They spent a long time with us, I was very impressed. The paint and brush was taken away in special boxes to be examined for finger prints.

When the fuss had died down I had a go at cleaning the wall with a power washer. I had expected the paint to come off with ease since it was only emulsion, but it turned out to be very difficult to shift.

I tried just messing the lettering up so that passers by could not make out the words but that failed too. After about 90 minutes of blasting I gave up and recovered the wall for the night.

The next morning I went over to the local DIY store to see if they had anything for removing graffiti. The assistant said they once stocked just the thing and that "it used to fly off the shelves" but they haven't had any in for ages. So the next best thing was a proprietary paint remover. The description on the tin said it was just what I needed, but of course they only had large tins - £17 ouch.

I decided to try it anyway and it turned out to be just what was needed. The instructions said to paint it on and leave it for an hour, then scrape it off.

The bricks are textured so scraping was out. I got a wire brush and some hot soapy water and set to work. It was hard going and not completely effective so I got the power washer out again.

Success! - The wall came up like new, it took about 30 minutes to completely remove any trace (and it was fun to do).

Now the physical damage has gone but the psychological effects are harder to deal with. The idiot who did this has only managed to frightened a harmless old person. In my opinion that makes them little better than whoever it was they intended to target. I'm hoping they will have realised their mistake and not come back but maybe that's a lot to hope for from an imbecile.  

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