Tuesday 31 July 2012

Whilst Walking

The other day I was walking home and I got cussed by a teenager in a wheelchair. The other day is a poor quantifier, it was last week actually, on a particularly sunny day. I walk past the Aspley Neurodisability Centre twice everyday. Once to work, and once on the way back. I have a vague history that faintly links me with the place but that is just something I smile about every now and then, and hardly very interesting. I also walk past an All Girls School, so my walk home is rife with chances for faux pas as it is, without being cussed by a teenager who I think it is safe to assume had some neurological disability. I don't even know if that is the correct terminology, if that is the right thing to say in the world of "Politcal Correctness gone mad" even though political correctness isn't mad at all bar a few exemplary cases, and is in fact a pretty good thing as it stops us all walking around sounding like paragraphs in articles written by Richard Littlejohn or Aidan Burley.

So, I was cussed by this teenager in a wheelchair, and it was fairly surreal. I walk everywhere, and if I can't walk somewhere I take the bus or I get a friend or family member to drive me there. I am absolutely confident that I should never be let loose behind the wheel of a car, but I can't say for certain that I will never end up in charge of one of those metal boxes hurtling down a road near you, in the future. I take a kind of fantastical pleasure out of being driven around by other people, even on the bus, where I like to think it is because I am simply to important to drive myself, but that isn't the case. As established, I was listening to some music, which music isn't important, but it was sunny so it was unlikely to have been anything that you could stick under the 'dance' or 'electronica' labels, so you can rule them out, with certainty. I had my headphones in, and I noticed a group of teenagers or 'youths' all amassed on the little wall in front of the building and instantly realied that, as the sole other occupant of this pocket universe, I was going to be noticed.

And lo, I was noticed.