society

Suits, skateboarding and disdain

So,

an old acquaintance of mine has taken exception to the Irregulars stance on Boris. Which I feel is so unassuredly correct that I shall not waste the effort dispelling his misconceptions. But he also makes allusions to the difficulty of being in a suit for the week, and out with a skateboard on the weekend. A problem I can more than empathise with as I am on a skateboard for a ocuple of the days of the week as well, and, as a scruffy web geek, have little need for the niceties of suits.

Indeed.

But also:

Which, as you can see, often leaves me adrift in a world of suits. I wrote a haiku in appreciation of this, but it is so bad I wouldn’t even put it on my blog.

And it got me thinking, when our own City Boy finds that

When the weekend finally arrives, I throw on my jeans and my hoody, sling my skateboard under my arm and jump back on the tube where I sit open-mouthed in amazement as mothers scoop up their children and move along the carriage careful to avoid making eye contact with me.

that I often find this; and I get it from guys in suits more than most. So I’m not sure here, perhaps our learned reader, evidently possessed of great taste, is not perhaps missing the lack of wearing a suit?

They seem to like the skateboard in the office, though.

Which brings me to another point, which is that I have a new job. It’s a great job, but irrelevant to the this article.

Sometimes, I think, when I am skateboarding, I might be expecting a little disdain. My essentially liberal demeanour gives everyone around me the freedom to express their opinions (there’s a funny story about holocaust deniers here), but perhaps I give a bit more freedom of expression to them then they really deserve…there are definitely more socially worrying things than skateboarders in London, vis:

I emerge bleary eyed at 10 o’clock every night and stumble onto the tube where I have been spat at, called names I don’t even understand and threatened with a knife.

Boris is not Jack Bauer

The tory spin in this election has played heavy on the fear, for once; the immediate ban on drinking on the tube is surely a sign of things to come, and it’s clear that Boris will rule with heavy hands. To paraphrase, the future of london is being pawed ineffectually by Boris’s fat, pink, heavy hands.

It’s clear enough to me that the whole ‘broken windows’, zero tolerance approach to crime that Boris is coming in on (and Lib Dem hero Brian Paddick was anti) is not going to help with the situation. On the most important side, will it deal with hoodlums?

Oh my, there’s a wikipedia article on the crack epidemic

Short answer is , maybe, even probably. New York is certainly doing better, but there has been a big backlash from the citizenry. On the other hand, the jackass who wrote Freakonomics puts the dropping crime rates down to the onset of access to legal abortion many years ago. What a jackass; I mean, “hello, causal fallacy!?!”. Actually, it’s basically as good a theory as broken windows, I just didn’t like the book. Still, I’m hazarding a guess that populations on average get happier when you legalise abortion than when you crack down on hoodlums.

But I would guess that.

Because what I really, really care about is not having police in the street with various powers over me. I’m unhappy I’m supposed to give my name in various circumstances, and things like the ID card make me so angry I stamp. I don’t want people spitting, mugging, or stabbing any more than the next guy, but I’d like to think that there’s enough decency in the huge majority of Londoners to make this an expectable, and acceptable risk. I live in the centre of one of the busiest cities anywhere; I encounter more people in a day, I suspect, than someone in the 1700’s would in a year (such an awesome metaphor). I get in a lot less fights, per day, than they would in a year, though. Glass half full and all that, yeah?

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