What New Madness Is This?

Pumba, a Welsh National Treasure, apparently...

Pumba was never a well thought through parkland scultpture but it was one that the kids liked to visit and climb over. No more...

I often get out walking in Wales, with the dog, and this is often in Cardiff, the city where I live. It's a dog walk through Bute Park. Just a few days ago I was out on a sunny afternoon and I spotted Pumba surrounded by a new enclosure with a padlocked gate firmly barring entrance and so engagement with 'Pumba'. Pumba has been fenced off at what looks to be great expense in order to protect the Welsh icon from further happy children's abuse of the grass covering that makes up the sorry mound.

I must ask the following:

• Why Pumba in a Cardiff park?

• Why the fake 'love' for the sculpture?

• Why the fence which appeared just recently and at, I assume, taxpayers expense?

• What has been the cost of Pumba from being a twinkle in a park keepers eye through to now and that to include the meetings and tea and biscuits and contracting for the fence etc...

I mean, give me a few turfs and a shovel and I'd have had Pumba looking ship shape, OR, given that things move on, flattened and re imagined as a picnic spot or some such.

Pumba has always been a frightfully frightful sculpture that has consistently offended my well educated eye but, as I say, the kids like it. But a sculpture that kids like to climb on fenced off is no fun at all... But then, given the shenanigans of the past couple of years it would appear that those in authority are determined to snuff out all of the joy in living.

Shame on Cardiff Council, yet again...