Blog: Minor Fracas/Minor Victory

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On the way home from Birmingham on Saturday night (which I'll get on to later) i was involved in a minor FRACAS on the train... and had that rarest of things, a minor VICTORY!

So, Steve and I were sat on the (horrible, badly designed, overpriced etc etc) Virgin Train heading back to London just after 9pm, with two girls sat in the seats in front of us. They spent the first hour SQUEALING and repeatedly playing lumps of music VERY LOUDLY INDEED on their phones. It was bloody annoying - a BIT of that sort of thing is fine, High Spirits and Youthful Exuberance etc, but it just went ON and ON and ON. If people like music THAT much, to KEEP playing it, you'd think they'd do so on something that WORKED, but it was the horrible TINNY sound of AUTO-TUNE... FOREVER!

After an HOUR of this i decided, possibly helped by the couple of small BEERS i'd had earlier on, to stop thinking GRUMPY THORTS and actually SAY something. So i did. LOOMING round the seat I said. "Excuse me, could you stop playing that shit please?"

You have obviously spotted my mistake. Within NANOSECONDS the horrified scream "DON'T SWEAR!" went up. EXACTLY the same as the LAST time i was involved in a reprimand for the anti-social, apparently you can be as AWFUL and INCONSIDERATE as you like, pissing off as many people as you like SO LONG AS YOU DON'T SWEAR.

Yes, middle-class newspapers, i AM available for a regular sideways looks at modern life, why do you ask?

I APOLOGISED for the language... or at least tried to, as I was subjected to a JET ENGINE of TELLING OFF. By HECK, if you had seen our conversation in a television sitcom you would have thought it base, easy satire on a younger generation condemned by their elders, but it was REALLY like that - a Vicky Pollard SCREAM STREAM of abuse about how, apparently, i shouldn't swear, it wasn't for an hour as I'd said, they hadn't been playing music, why couldn't i just asks, how dare i swear... etc etc. After a full 120 seconds of this I said "Well, just stop doing it and that'll be lovely" and sat back down.

I was, of course, QUAKING with the atypical stress caused by Actually Saying Something, whilst my opponents set to LOUDLY COMPLAINING about my incursion. Is this not, gentle reader, always the way? Getting A Bit Annoyed by other people acting unsocially is something you just get USED to and can forget about after a bit of a moan. The PANIC, FEAR and RAGE you get if you DO something, that sticks around FOREVER, and it rarely has a profitable outcome.

Ten minutes later my heart was still RACING, when the ticket inspector came along. And guess what? The two girls did NOT have tickets. Well, they DID, apparently, they just didn't have them with them. And why was the ticket inspector doubting them? Was he calling them liars? Why wouldn't they have tickets... and so on as the poor chap stood there flabbergasted. Eventually he managed to tell them that they had to have tickets ACTUALLY WITH THEM and would therefore need to buy NEW ones, so they demanded he sell them CHILD tickets. Oh, but they didn't have any money on them to do so.

It was getting on for eleven o'clock at night at this point, so he said, in an Actual Kindly, Not Arsey, way "Well, if you ARE minors, I'm not really comfortable about letting the two of you just get off the train in London near midnight with no money, I'd better call the London Transport Police."

OH THE NOISE! The distress! THE RAGE! "I'll be back in a few minutes", he said, as a noise like a Fox in World Of Chickens gathered. Ten minutes later he DID come back... and the pair of them STORMED OFF THE TRAIN, disembarking at glamorous WATFORD JUNCTION, as the ticket inspector stood AGOG, saying "You're ... getting off at Watford?!?"

Please do not think too ill of me - they clearly WEREN'T underage, DID have money, and there WAS another train coming along afterwards, which they probably got on and still didn't buy a ticket for, so they'd be FINE - but I must admit to taking a small scintilla of JOY from the outcome of the evening. Goodness knows it didn't encourage me to become a vigilante of Small Justice or anything, but it was nice to see KARMA in action for once, even if it came in the unlikely shape of a Virgin Trains ticket inspector.

posted 24/1/2011 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

You needed The Tower with you.
posted 24/1/2011 by Tim Eveleigh

you should totally team up with Michael Legge: http://michaelleggesblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/quiet-man.html
posted 24/1/2011 by Steve

TUBE MAN would be proud!
posted 24/1/2011 by Dan H

"I was, of course, QUAKING with the atypical stress caused by Actually Saying Something, whilst my opponents set to LOUDLY COMPLAINING about my incursion. Is this not, gentle reader, always the way? Getting A Bit Annoyed by other people acting unsocially is something you just get USED to and can forget about after a bit of a moan. The PANIC, FEAR and RAGE you get if you DO something, that sticks around FOREVER, and it rarely has a profitable outcome. " That is a beautiful and wise paragraph...ever thought about writing a Bible of FACT?
posted 25/1/2011 by PhoenIX PhiL

"Ever thought about writing a Bible of FACT?" Young man, i call it my DISCOGRAPHY!
posted 25/1/2011 by MJ Hibbett

ha ha very true. well theres a title for your box set sorted should you ever choose to release one
posted 26/1/2011 by PhoeniXPhiL

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