I got on the bus on Brixton Hill. There were no empty double seats, and no empty single outside halves. So I turned to a woman and said "Excuse me, please..", expecting her to shove over or stand up. Instead, grudgingly, she swung her legs round and glared at me. She was no thinner than me (and I'm being kind...). She obviously hadn't clocked my rucksack, sitting happily on my back, containing my handbag, a three-CD box set, a sandwich box, an A5 notebook, and my camera, as well as assorted ephemera. I just could not avoid clouting her in the face...
I alighted from the Tube at Vauxhall station. I have a slight problem at Vauxhall. I emerge from the Northbound platform, and have to cross over the path from the 'down' escalator to reach the 'up' esclator. At that time of day, people are pouring off suburban South Western Trains to hit the Vic line to head into Central London. I am amazed at how many of them run. I have some sympathy with people running for trains. If they are only once in fifteen minutes and you just miss one, it's an irritating waste of time.
But the Victoria Line? In the peak the trains are a minute apart. Two at most. I wonder how stressed these people are. I decided in my early twenties that I intended to spend the best part of forty years travelling to work. I decided to make the best of it, relax and enjoy the experience. Their stress is their problem. But when they lack the ability to anticipate people emerging from the platform and cannon into them, it becomes a wider problem. I am fairly steady on my feet and fairly solidly built, but I still don't like being barged into.
Going up the stairs to leave the station. I followed a man wielding a bright yellow golfing-umbrella-as-ski-pole. At about the level of my eyes. He was waving it around unpredictably. So, at the top of the stairs I pointed out to him that he was brandishing a dangerous weapon and he could hurt someone. He looked at me with utter contempt and said,
"Calm down dear..."
I thought - 'So, you wish to be patronising. You have summoned up all your intelligence and your experience of nearly twenty-five years on this planet and the best put-down you can come up with is a catch phrase from a universally loathed TV advert fronted by a universally detested Michael Winner for a product resolutely not targeted at you. '
What a shame I couldn't summon up a pithy soundbite to precis that. He was wearing an iPod.
It reminded me a few weeks ago I decided to take my chance and cross Horseferry Road. There were traffic light controlled junctions to the left and right of me , but I just could not be arsed to walk down, so I decided to dodge the traffic. Usually it works; on this occasion I got unlucky and had to wait on the white line. I was not frightfully bothered, just kept looking at the traffic to my left, and occasionally to my right. A white van drove past, and the man driving it decided to laugh at me in a sneering put-down way. I wondered what his point was. Okay, I had misjudged - hey not the end of the world. But he was driving a white van and wearing a Post-It Note coloured tie.
A few years ago I was at a friend's house and she was showing me a book someone had bought her, called How To Bring Up Boys, or somesuch. It was so bad it was comedy. It was predicated on an assumption of all fathers being emotionally illiterate and stunted (and omni-absent) and all mothers being paranoic smotherers, with no acquaintance with any men, and it said some really stupid things.
But amidst the almost total stupidity was one notion that made me think - the rule-proving exception - that many boys are arrogant and condescending because no one has bothered to take them down a peg or two. I have some sympathy for boys in their mid teens, with their adult-size bodies but poor co-ordination, their adolescent emotions, and their confusion about their role (child? adult?) and what it takes to be a man. Much of the cockiness is a mask for a lack of self-esteem and subtlety.
But when men in their twenties or thirties are wielding yellow umbrellas or wearing yellow ties and putting other people down, I reckon they have not left that adolescence.
Update: And if Sasha had trackback, I could link to a post which finishes
And they looked to me like kids whose parents had never said to them, "you know, son, you might sometimes be wrong."
