social fools

I went to London a bit. I smilingly refused a Big Issue seller, and he said something that sounded amicable, although the only word I could make out was the last: 'Bye!' Later, I uneasily concluded that he might well have been saying: 'Die slowly in terror - bye!' I passed a man talking very loudly to his friend about the girl he was seeing: 'Do you know what her father does? HE INSURES COUNTRIES!'

On the train back from a gig by the 'reinvigorated' Swans - Time Is Money (Bastard) and You Fucking People Make Me Sick are representative titles - a young guy jabbering away to some girls inspired another male passenger to refer to him as a 'mouthy prick'. This resulted in a marked increase in the young guy's jabbering, to the effect that he was a 'gangsta' and cage fighter who could 'knock anyone out in his weight category' ('runt' being the category, as far as I could tell) and eventually he was pushed out onto the platform at Gidea Park by a group of men, who were bored with him standing in the doorway trying to phone for 'backup' and thus preventing the doors from closing. For all I know, he is on the platform still, shaking his fist.

Afterwards one of the men who had helped to eject him then made a kind of speech about it, rather as though he had faced down the Russian mafia instead of pushing an over-excited twerp off a train. We should 'stand up to these people', he maintained and not just sit there pretending it wasn't happening (which, needless to say, was what I was doing).

'Well', said one of the other men involved, clearly wanting the subject closed, 'we did stand up to him.'

'Well', the first man replied, feebly, 'we should do it more often.' As if talking about a possible series of jolly nights out.

Someone else even suggested that this was David Cameron's Big Society in action, but I'm pretty sure that that was a joke. The comment, not the policy. Although also the policy.