I hate neds
I was on the way back from work this after a day working at a tiling company in Croydon. I took the number 131 bus, which left Wimbledon about 7.47pm towards Kingston. The bus had three “neds” at the back – yobbos with at least one container of some form of alcohol, who sat there for my whole journey making an enormous, frightening, foul-mouthed noise.
I had a look at the ChavTowns site tonight, on which someone has posted yet another moan about the ne’er-do-wells infesting a provincial town – in this case, Uckfield in Sussex. I had my own moan about this website last year, because the site’s coverage of my old home town (Croydon) was wildly inaccurate. I get the impression that the contributors are scarcely less common than the people they insult. But it seems that what makes you a chav is that you have extremely poor taste. Which isn’t a crime.
Making a nuisance of yourself on the bus is a different story, and it’s become such an issue over the past few years that the present government has introduced a system of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (Asbos) to deal with yobbos who make their neighbours’ lives a misery. These orders have had undesirable side effects and are a controversial innovation in legal terms, but one wonders what else could be done about these people. Then again, I don’t think these three yobs actually intended to hurt anyone, but I noticed people changing seats on more than one occasion to get away from these people.
We all have our own ways of avoiding trouble – notably, by avoiding looking at people and making eye contact – but I was also afraid to move seats lest I give them the impression that I was frightened or annoyed by them. I can remember how nervous I was at school when teachers walked out of the room during lessons, leaving me alone with potentially hostile classmates, but in the “real world” there is often no authority around – no police (foot patrols are not effective in fighting crime, apparently), and there are no guards or conductors on most buses nowadays. Perhaps they should be bringing them back. After all, what can they be doing with the recently massively increased fares?
