Get off the damn pavement
May 2009 |
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That exact same thing happened to me the other day but it was distinctly unfunny! Why was it unfunny? Well for starters the pavement was wide enough to fit the entire von Trap family in a line across it. Secondly this ‘near miss’ was easily avoidable.
I could see the guy approaching from about half a mile away and realised that we were both on the left hand side of the pavement and would ultimately collide if one of us didn’t move. Being the intelligent and considerate person that I am, I took the initiative and moved to the right. Head down, I carried on with my walk and when I looked back up a few seconds later he was on my side of the pavement again. So once again, I moved and sure enough when I looked up again he had followed me. This happened about three times and it was as if I had some sort of human magnet attached to my body! By this stage we were too close to avoid the silly dance routine and supremely unfunny one-liner that inevitably came out of this guy’s mouth.
What was most annoying about this was the fact that it was an elderly chap so I couldn’t really be rude or even put on an angry expression. This is the thing with old people you see – they can get away with this kind of loutish street behaviour.
It has to be said that old women are the worst offenders of poor street etiquette. How many times have you been walking down the street and two or more old women have been coming the other way, usually with those horrible trolleys? How many times have they even made the slightest effort to get out of your way? None! The number of times I have had to walk in the road and nearly been run over by their elderly accomplice driving a Nissan Micra beggars belief.
Even when they are walking in the same direction as you they are a nightmare. Being a young, fit and rather tall young man, I tend to walk at quite a quick pace and I will usually come steaming up behind some elderly woman pushing her trolley right in the middle of the pavement at zero miles an hour. I decide I’ll pass them on the left and suddenly they will veer in that direction so I try the other side and low and behold they decide to drift over again. It is like they have eyes in the back of their heads and they are deliberately doing it to me because they are somehow aware that I am in a rush because I’m late again.
Of course, by the time they have meandered fifty times to block your path, you are practically standing on top of them and this is where they pull the last trick up their corduroy sleeve: They stop. For no reason. In the middle of the pavement. So I end up walking into the back of them. Now being both relatively young and over six feet tall, I appreciate that I probably look quite intimidating to an elderly statesman or woman and they automatically hand me their wallet or handbag because they think I’m about to mug them. This week alone I made £42.36, a copy of The Daily Mail and a cabbage.
My other pet hate is when you get a group of old women standing in the street chatting about whatever it is old people bang on about and taking up the entire pavement with a blockade of those damn trolleys. Again, do they move out of the way when they see someone coming? No more than they do when they pull the same trick in Supermarkets with even bigger trolleys.
Is it just me or are more old people riding around in those funny little electric buggies? I’m sure I am seeing more of those things whizzing up and down the high street these days. They are another street nightmare because they don’t really belong on the pavement. Nor do they belong on the road. You see pedestrians being scattered by a grizzly old timer who is grumbling to himself and thinking that, just because he fought in the Napoleonic Wars of 1803, he has more right to the pavement than everyone else.
They are even more annoying when they drive on the road because they are slow enough and wide enough to cause traffic jams and they are also too sturdy to ram with the car.
Being electric, I’ve often wondered how often they run out of juice when the owner is doing the daily rounds down to the shop for tea bags and a newspaper. I doubt there is a buggy equivalent of the AA and, being old and consequently confused by mobile phones, they wouldn’t be able to ring for assistance even if there was. I’ve never personally seen that but I did once witness an old lady try to bunny-hop a curb in one and proceed to get stuck.
Now I don’t want to sound disrespectful because if it wasn’t for people like my granddad, I would be writing this article in German and, as everybody knows, the Germans don’t have a sense of humour so it wouldn’t quite have the same effect.
Given how much we are hearing about the increase in street crime, knife attacks, underage drinking and hoodies with their trousers hanging off their back side demonstrating their poor grasp of the English language to law enforcement officers, why don’t we get old people to prowl around the streets at night instead of PC plod? No one is going to be disrespectful to an old person, they can bore the youths to death with stories about how things were different in their day and they can run the rest over in their electric buggies.
