The hedge hooligans need a short sharp shock

We've become obsessed with boundaries; and hedgerows have become the new weapons of war

The traditional view of August is that it is the time of year when serious, grown-up news goes into a brief state of slumber. Politicians pose in holiday mufti with their families. Celebrities allow themselves to be snapped by the pool-side with their latest lover or – something of a new trend here – baby.

While nothing much of significance happens, trivia enjoys its moment in the sun: a Czech doctor announces that drinking beer helps the male libido; an actress's collagen implant makes her face look like a blancmange; a cat suffers from sunburn on its ears. Events which, at any other time of the year, would merit a chirpy paragraph at the end of a gossip column are briefly afforded front-page status.

Another, alternative theory prevails. Conventional news items of the grander sort tell only half the story of our lives. The stuff of the media silly season, far from being so much pointless froth, offers us snapshots of real, small lives in crisis and therefore have their own kind of seriousness, often representing a trend of wider significance.

The story which covered not only the front page of the Eastern Daily Press last week, but also pages two and three, concerned the hedge, or rather the former hedge, of Malcolm and Marlene Girling of Witton, Norfolk. It was 15 feet (5m) high, contained holly, sycamore, laurel, hawthorn and a leylandii and stood between the Girlings' garden and that of Dr John and Linda Williams. Its removal has led to Malcolm and Marlene each being sentenced to a month in jail.

According to Dr John and Linda, the Girlings have made their lives hell. They allowed the Williams's driveway to be blocked by the cars of visitors. They let their two alsatians, named Boris and Bess, to roam freely and crap liberally on the Williams's lawn. One of the dogs had given Linda, who works at the University of East Anglia, a nasty nip. Dr John, who works for a local solicitor, set up CCTV cameras to record evidence of problems.

Not surprisingly, the hedge between them took on some significance, a fact not lost on Malcolm, a civil engineer, and Marlene, a beautician. When an injunction was granted against any reduction in its height, Malcolm acted, in the words of his son-in-law, like "a red-blooded Englishman who thinks his home is his castle" and responded with a chainsaw and digger. When Dr John protested, he was threatened with a five-foot stake, was told that the Girlings were "real men and women" while he was "a ratbag, yellow and a pervert".

At first glance, this dispute would seem to be nothing out of the ordinary, a clash of lifestyles and class attitudes of a typically English kind, from which neither couple, one with its security cameras, the other with its alsatians and chainsaw, emerges with much credit. But then, other instances of what are known as hedge wars suggest their dispute is part of a wider picture.

Hardly a month goes by without some row over the deployment of the thick and fast-growing leylandii appearing in the press: not long ago, the hedges of an entire Norfolk village were razed to the ground by a phantom enemy of the tree.

Last week, in another border dispute, a woman was sent to Brockhill Prison near Redditch for three months because she – or rather her mother, who controlled the land – refused to move a fence that intruded on to a neighbour's land. The land involved was worth £100; so far, it has been the subject of 20 court hearings, costing £90,000 in legal costs, and has led to a three-month stretch inside.

It would be too easy to put this behaviour down to eccentricity or vindictiveness. Rather, they are part of a national anxiety over territory that is new and growing. The roads are becoming more clogged. Commuters fight over seats on trains. Large swathes of the countryside in south-east England will soon be sacrificed to the needs of houses. The sky above us hums with aircraft, full of people. At the entrance to the Channel Tunnel, people are clambering on to trains and lorries.

No wonder that privacy, a refuge away from the madness and stress, has become the focus of so many lives, to the joy of estate agents and developers. When put into crowded conditions, the behaviour of laboratory rats deteriorates. At the moment, rightly or wrongly, the English are feeling like those rats and are reacting accordingly. We have become obsessed with boundaries. Hedgerows, which usefully grow bigger and stronger year by year, have become weapons of war.

If, as seems likely, hedge wars are here to stay, we have to decide how to treat hedge hooligans, whether they be cutters or growers. Perhaps a short spell in an institution whose boundaries are firm and beyond negotiation will be a useful lesson in how to live with our neighbours on this small, crowded island.

terblacker@aol.com