This is the line

As I walk this town, I walk with an internal guide: my rights and responsibilities. I look to it for measures, balances, pressures, sensitivities, maybes/maybe nots.

I assess a situation. Probably I should not walk here, take this object from there, access this place, try that door. But I can presume another, assume this space, assert my place. I can do this, do that, walk through here, ignore this notice, know another resident is assuming more rights than they have. Do I respect their desires, contest their ambitions, or seek a compromise? Life is negotiable.

Then what if it is bin night! Considerations change when the objects come out!

Weekend, if I were to take this object from here, then the resident I live beside would have the law on their side for redress. But bin night! This table, chair, fridge, hamster cage, propped against a wall in the back alley? An object placed here, in a common space, one night of the week, assumes new begging status. Sometimes a resident attaches a piece of paper that reassures the uncertain: Free to a Good Home. It's how we do things in this town.

So I walk, each moment, with an assumption of how the boundaries are flexible. Vaguely, I tell myself, if I stay within the rules - whatever they are, whatever we can negotiate them to be - then I need not have direct confrontation with anyone.

But today I came across the confrontation, the non-negotiable, the rule.

Closure Notice. Headed Anti-Social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014 Part 4 Chapter3 s76.

Sticky-taped to the window of a high-street shop.

Precision meets vague expression, open interpretation, catch-all phrasing. To me, reader and passer-by, this notice conveys to this shop owner the message, stop now, because whatever you're trading, we, the authorities don't want you to trade it.

'Having reasonable grounds to suspect that the use of the premises has resulted, or (if the notice is not issued) is likely soon to result, in nuisance to members of the public, or that there has been, or (if the notice is not issued) is likely soon to be, disorder near these premises associated with the use of these premises, and that the notice is necessary to prevent the nuisance or disorder from continuing, recurring or occurring.'

Your freedom to interpret, my freedom to interpret, meets the written line of the law.

Personally, on this one, I was glad to see this legalese notice; I gave a little whoop in support of the law, vague though it is. Life negotiable, and in this place, at this time, I want the settlement to fall on the side of my values. This is my town, and I don't want this shop to trade in the streets I walk.

But I smiled to read the shop owner's response, written in marker pen on a piece of torn cardboard, sticky-taped to the left.