On the tube today a man came along the carriage begging for money. For once, I had some coins in my pocket and handed over £1.25. The man gave me a fist pump and a tap on the shoulder and called me his brother. I smugly sat back and tried not to catch the eye of any fellow travelers who were perhaps suitably humbled. At the next stop a slew of five or six-year-old children tumbled into the carriage with their teachers and minders, on the way to the museums at South Kensington. The teacher spoke out: would anyone be willing to stand up to let the children sit down? The woman next to me stood up. Well, one: I’m against grown-ups standing up for children. Two: I’d already forked out £1.25 that morning. I did not let the woman who had stood up catch my eye. So I sat next to the kids and overheard one boy starting up a game of I Spy. I spy with my little eye. Something beginning with…, he said. Black, blurted out an Indian boy next to me and laughed. The boy starting the game was black. Yes. It’s a moral minefield on the district line.
Monthly Archives: October 2024
October 10: nasty residue
It was the dreadful Milton hurricane that struck Florida last night. This morning I caught an edge of an interview with someone on the radio who said it hadn’t been as bad as she had imagined. Instinctively my heart sunk. I felt it descend, even though I knew it shouldn’t. The little boy in me wanted some great footage of devastation. I immediately tried to haul myself back into feeling a sense of relief that it had not been as catastrophic as had been foreseen. I am not a cruel man. and I am not a kid. And yet, there is this nasty residue from some more primitive nature somewhere that wants an action movie rather than a humane outcome.
‘The poetry is in the pity’, someone once said (was it Wilfred Owen?). The poet looks through the drama and finds the human, by-passing the lust for chaos which might just brighten up a dull morning.
October 9: dubious eddies
I have been looking for a chocolate brown jumper for many years now. Men don’t get colours offered to them by the commerce. All we seem to require is grey and navy blue. Recently I have turned my attentions to a pair of yoga pants/sports bottoms for my trips to the gym. My most recent pair of bottoms I got from Decathlon. Useless looking in the men’s aisles. Men’s sports bottoms are gathered at the ankle and low in the crotch. They make you look like an ape. So I looked in the women’s section and tried on a pair of Extra Large women’s. Black, so discreet enough. Perfect for my purposes. Elegant and not too effeminate. This week I pushed the boat out into unchartered waters and bought a chocolate brown pair of women’s sports bottoms on line. Today was their first outing. They are more risky than the black decathlon pair. I think I carried it off all right. As a northerner I am sensitive to the accusations of effeminate dress. But, to be honest, these days with earrings, necklaces and bracelets, not to mention make-up, all active in the modern man’s look, why am I worrying? Still, this is a trend I think I need to be wary of. I wouldn’t want to end up inching into dubious eddies of those afore mentioned unchartered waters.
October 2: bonjour le contact
I am trying to be open to people in my daily navigations in town. I helped a couple take a buggy and child up some stairs on the tube the other day, missing my train in the process. You see the sacrifices I make. There was another one two minutes later, mind. Modern life pushes us away from contact. If you can get an app for it, do it, they say. So that we are raising a generation with pods in their ears, noses in their phones, hoods over their heads, scarves over their faces, sometimes covering everything except an eye slit. As they say in French. Bonjour, le contact. That’s contact down the drain. Older people are better but madder, or, rather, more idiosyncratic in their madness. I suppose, when someone starts jabbering on the tube you move away. It’s either personal mental chaos or religion-inspired chaos. We have to pick our communications. The young are more in thrall to the seductions of tech. I have silently, surreptitiously, in a way that will be deemed abhorrent by the great powers of our world, become a technophobe. I like to see it as a kind of occult and very dreadful resistance.
peoplearerubbish 