The man on the street

Ah, the great British public. Please save me from them/it.

I was having a chat with a woman who has the job of promoting public transport initiatives for people working in Universities/big hospital area just south of the city centre in Manchester. She asked where I came to work from and acknowledged that it's pretty poorly-serviced in terms of a direct bus route - in fact, it's not serviced at all. "But the number 8 is a great service to Shudehill". I agreed with her -it is - but added that I wouldn't like to do it any more frequently than once or twice a year because it gets full of scumbags from Salford.

The problem with public transport is that it means you're confined in a small space with members of the public, and this is something that can cause me great distress. If they could ensure that you didn't have to share your journey with the dregs of society who take pleasure in intimidating fellow passengers without fear or reproach, then this would be a step in the right direction in making bus travel more attractive.

So back to the man on the street. My particular encounter with man on the street today took place near the pond that's on my route to the shops. I tried not to stare at the bloke as he walked in my direction; something wasn't right with his face. I made the mistake of making eye contact with him and he stopped to talk to me:

"You see all these here?" Close-to, I could see that his nose was plastered across his face from what looked like a pretty old injury. He was swaying. He was VERY Scouse. "You see all these here?"

"What, the ducks?"

"Yeah", he swayed, "they're all fuckin' quackers!"

Oh how my sides split!

"Yeah", I agreed, "they're pretty mad, it's freezing today. You should see them in winter when the pond's half frozen over, they still sit in that water all day. Sometimes I think they get frozen in."

"Oh right, like, yeah, I went to visit my mate in the fuckin' [mental health unit] and one of the fuckin' ducks had got in there and laid all its eggs inside the fuckin' yard. Fuckin' mental."

"Yeah, they're great. They lay eggs in the hospital courtyard too and, when the chicks hatch, they put a paddling pool out for them so they can learn to swim."

"No fuckin' way!"

"They certainly do!"

"Well, that's just fuckin' great. Hey, you're a nice person."

I'm a nice person.

I stopped for a 2 minute conversation with stranger who looked as rough as hell, who swore even more than I do, but who wanted nothing more than to have a chat about the ducks and that makes me a nice person. It makes me a bit ashamed of how I allow myself to form opinions about people. I don't think I am a particularly nice person; I'm opinionated, short tempered, irreverent and impatient, but there you go. There are scummy people out there, utter shitbags. But there are a lot of people who don't really have much to offer, and in all honesty possibly can't help themselves much, but who are happy to stop a stranger and talk about ducks. There can't be too much wrong with that.


Another man on the street
Aki got in trouble for stopping young people and asking to feel and measure their muscles and asking them to do squats so he could see their muscles. He's now been banned from doing this. Perhaps he should investigate ducks as a means of breaking the ice when meeting strangers.


ANOTHER man on the street
There are plenty of bigots out there, religious or otherwise. It's odd that we don't kick up too much of a stink about so-called Christian fundamentalists spouting their filth while having dangerous amounts of influence in US politics, yet everytime a "radical muslim cleric" comes out with something outrageous, there's open-season on Islam.

Still, after a couple of weeks where the wearing of veils by a tiny minority of muslim women in the UK has been in the spotlight, the whole debate on muslim dress and that is still in the news. No surprise then that a bit of a stink has been kicked up by Sheikh al-Hilali's comments about the way women dress attracting unwanted attention from men and that women who don't wear the Hijab (headscarf) are like raw meat attracting flies or cats or something. You see, when people use daft metaphors, they're always open to misinterpretation. If he'd just said "women who don't cover up are asking for it because men are animals who can't keep it in their pants, then it wouldn't have been nearly as insulting as likening women to bits of meat and men to alley cats or flies or summat!

But who'd have thought that something as simple as wearing a headscarf would protect a woman from rapists? Genius! I can see this being the basis of a new super heroine. And if, as implied, the problem is that men can't control themselves, why aren't they made to wear blindfolds or kept locked up?

Then again, the Catholic church won't allow the ordination of gay priests "because of its rampant problem with paedophiles". Of course, all gay men are paedophiles, aren't they?

And then there's the delightful "God hates fags" group that protests outside military hospitals in the states and shouts abuse at injured service personnel. They blame injuries to US troops, and I think Hurricaine Katrina, on America's liberal attitude to gays.

Fucking hell, they're all mad!

I'll get off my anti-religion soap box now. Things like this wind so many folk up and make it difficult to remember how many millions of good people enjoy their faiths without causing one bit of trouble, and how many people without faith are complete and utter wankers.

Essentially, people are split into a number of categories, irrespective of sex, colour, race, religion, social class, whether they drive a people carrier:

• Lovelable
• Likeable
• OK
• Tolerable
• Annoying
• Insufferable
• Total cunt

The other stuff just allows them to associate with loveable, OK, tolerable, annoying, insufferable cunts of the same sex, ethnicity, religion or Renault owners club membership status.