(please assume all references to ‘men’ mean people)

Once upon a time there was a dirt road between 2 small villages. The villages were pretty and the fields inbetween were pretty too.

A man stood in the middle of the road, between the 2 villages. He was admiring the view.

Another man walked along the road. He stopped where the first man was standing, because he couldn’t get past. He asked the first man to move. He wouldn’t, so the second man shook his head, walked round him and carried on.

A little while later the first man grew tired of standing up and so sat down. Not long after that a third man walked along the road. He also stopped, asked and walked around. This happened many times with many people. Occaisionally someone would try to persuade the man to sit somwhere else. Sometimes an argument ensued, sometimes there were fights. Ineveitably the persuader would realise the pointlessness of wasting more time and would go on his way leaving the man sitting where he was.

The first man put his tent up in the middle of the road. More and more people walked around him. The grass next to the road soon became trampled down and before long, no one stopped to ask him to move. This upset the man. He wasn’t going to move, whatever they said or did, but they ought to at least ask.

As time went on, the first man built a house on the patch of road where his tent had been.

A new road was built around the house, so that the cars didn’t have to drive on the grass.

The villages grew bigger. They became towns. People moved to one and worked in the other. The traffic between them increased. Houses appeared close to the first man’s house.

The first man made a garden around his house, digging up some of the road to do so. When anybody asked him what he was doing, or told him not to, he shouted at them until they went away.

Later, when the road was widened, the road around the first man’s house (and his newly claimed garden) was widened too.

By and by, people forgot there was ever a road under the house.

One day, someone new came to the area with a map and a book. They walked up to the first man’s house and asked him to move, because the road was going to be made into a motorway, and motorways don’t have curves. Besides, according to the book, he had no planning permission to be there. He refused to move, was incredibly rude to the man with the map and slammed the door in his face. The man’s neighbours came out of their houses to see what was going on. The man-with-the-map told them. They laughed at him and said;

“But you can’t make him move now – he’s been there 60 years! You’ll have to wait until he leaves before you can build your motorway.”