CULTURE CLASH

“People come and people go, moving fast and moving slow…”

Despite my current lack of animation and motivation, the world continues to unfold around me in strange and peculiar ways. The news remains full of angst and woe, and the silly little schoolboys are squabbling over their pocket money whilst rushing us headlong into a war that nobody really wanted.

And the world gets madder, and the world gets madder, and humanity becomes ever more disappointing to those of us able to see it, as we massacre our fellow species as effectively as we have learned to massacre our own.

But as long as we’ve got our new toys to play with, it seems that few of us are actually prepared to care, and the minds of the young are manipulated into partaking in the madness by master-minds able to lift the blinkers from their eyes and show them the laughably imbecilic world that we’ve created.

So what hope is there for any of us…?

I was on a train at the weekend, and my journey home rom the theatre happened to coincide with kicking out time at one of the bigger footballing games of the weekend, and so the train was not only packed with families on their way home from a day’s shopping, but also with a number of footballing supporters who sang extraordinarily crude songs at the very tops of their voices despite the fact that we believed that their language excesses might have been likely to be tempered by the presence of lots of young children and people who might have resembled their mums.

No such luck.

People these days, it seems, have little shame and few boundaries.

“My old man, said be a XX fan…”

Ah, you probably know it.

Interestingly, at one point a passenger in front of us, drinking from a beer can and wearing a shirt of the opposite footballing hue, finally snapped and headed off back down the carriage towards song central, and a very ominous and intimidating “THUD!!!” was heard throughout the carriage shortly afterwards, but that still didn’t stop the singing.

More interestingly, in front of us sat two distinct and separate families which both had amongst their numbers small boys of about nine or ten. Of course, as is the way of things nowadays, neither family made the youngsters give up their seats for the older people who got on the train later, but I suppose that I’ll have to let that pass.

It is, after all, an “old-fashioned” point of view, even though I would never have got away with it my youth.

The point here is that we noticed that each of the small boys was wearing a footballing shirt, and they were shirts from opposite sides of the great Manchesterford Footballing Divide, as I like to call it. They were both sitting on adjacent seats, albeit on opposite sides of the carriage, but neither was hurling abuse at the other simply for having a different favourite, or an alternative point of view.

It was the Beloved who pointed them out to me as they were gathering their things together (including shoeboxes claiming to have “Average contents – 2”) to disembark.

“The sad thing is” she remarked, sagely “Add fifteen years and they’ll be hurling abuse at each other just like those others…”

And, you know, the really sad thing is that she’s probably right.