Saturday

Has anyone else wondered why we all seem so angry nowadays? I'll give you an example. This morning I walked down to the library, passing the bus stop on the way. A young, bespectacled Indian man stood at the stop, reading a newspaper, and a pretty black girl was beside him, with a young child in a push chair. When the bus he wanted approached, the Indian man stepped forward to board it, accidentally bumping the push chair, and giving it a small jolt. He apologised at once, and stood back to allow the girl to precede him on to the bus.

The girl went crazy! That's the only way I can describe it, her pretty face twisted into a malevolent snarl, and she screamed at the man: 'Go and f... your mother!' over and over again. The poor man stood there with his mouth open, an elderly black woman in the bus queue tried to pacify her, and everyone else (including me) looked the other way. The Indian man thought better of boarding the bus, and made off down the street. But why the overreaction? And what about the child? If s/he grows up to see mother behaving like that, how will it in turn behave?

The problem, of course, is that that was not an isolated incident. People lose their tempers and scream over the slightest little thing. I was on the top deck of a bus the other day, and watched a man descending the stairs to get off. He kicked, quite by accident, the bag of another man, who was standing actually on the stairs where he should not have been, where it was difficult to squeeze past him. The man with the bag shouted and swore, and finished up with: 'No wonder people get stabbed!(?????)

Why is everyone so bad tempered? There was a time, believe it or not, when the inhabitants of this land were actually known as 'the polite British.'