Green and senseless land

I'm not an angry man. I am, as they say, slow to anger. I very rarely get angry with people. Usually inanimate objects bear the brunt of it - chair legs, door frames and anything else that might cause me to occasionally painfully stub one or another part of my body - but it's mostly computers that piss me off. Even the most foul-mouthed Tourettes sufferer would likely blush at the torrent of blue langauge that spills fluently from my lips when I'm forced to sit and wait for a computer to do something.

My lack of patience with computers aside, I'm sure most people who know me would agree that I am a chilled out kind of a guy. Since returning from India I think I've been even more shanthi than I was before. Sometimes I feel like I'm floating around in a lovely bubble, observing the world through serene eyes with infinite patience. Sometimes it feels like I can see beauty in even the ugliest thing and nothing bad can ever touch me. Yes, I know it all sounds a bit hippyish and fanciful but it's true.

When you're in a crazy country like India or Cambodia, there's an attitude you have to adopt in order to cope with the rigours of forty-eight hour bus journeys, pushy rickshaw drivers, filthy toilets, obtuse railway staff and belligerent soldiers. I call it traveller zen. It enables you to remain calm in pretty much any situation because you know you have absolutely no control over it's outcome. Getting angry is counter-productive. Your best bet is to simply smile.

Therefore, it's with a sense of despair rather than anger that I reflect now on some of the more unpleasant aspects of English society. I'm a little disillusioned today because amidst the unifying fervour of World Cup fever I see a country more divided than ever. I know - it's a bold statement to make, isn't it? That's why I'm not going to explain what I mean at this point. I need a bit of time to reflect on it, I think perhaps I should come back round to it via a different route. First I'll tell you what the particular catalyst for this feeling of disenchantment is.

Actually there are three stories to tell here, all of them linked - it's a sort of cute little triptych on the theme of hooliganism. Wait a minute, I'd better make sure I know what triptych actually means before I use it...

Okay - panic over, triptych is a bona fide word. It may be bloody pretentious but at least it's not incorrect.

Yesterday evening as I cycled out to watch the footy I felt a bit edgy, possibly because I didn't like the look of the pub my brother had picked to watch it in. I had my reasons. A few months ago, only days after I arrived back in Bristol, I happened to be standing opposite it waiting for a friend when I was very nearly run over. It was a chilly spring evening, I was sheltering from a light drizzle beneath my umbrella and feeling quite dapper with the collar of my winter coat turned up against the wind. I heard the deep growl of a car engine and turned to see a white van pass within inches of where I stood and screech to a halt on the pavement behind me.

Let me put it another way, just in case I'm not making myself clear. There was me, stood on the pavement, perhaps a foot from the kerb, facing towards the road. Then there was the van, passing behind me, being driven along the pavement between me and the shop fronts, travelling at a speed in excess of twenty miles an hour, which may not sound like much until I remind you that it was on the fucking pavement.

I stood there, incredulous, staring at the immobile van a few metres away. As I watched, the rear door opened and a burly, muscular man in a tight fitting t-shirt stepped out. He glanced contemptuously at me and then sauntered over the road and into the pub, his arms swinging in that strange, simian manner that top-heavy meatheads sometimes favour. Another man stepped out of the van onto the pavement and followed the first man into the pub. Another emerged. Then another... and another... and another. In all, about ten men - all of them clearly tanked up on booze - emerged from the van and walked into the pub over the road, some of them leered in my general direction but most of them ignored me.

I recall saying to myself at the time, "That is a pub I never want to enter."

I couldn't really understand why my sensitive brother would choose such a place, apart from the fact that it possibly had just the right British bulldog-esque, neo-fascist atmosphere needed for an authentic English football experience. I admit that I may have become a snob in the time I've been away, either that or my brother has become less discriminating. Either way, I'm sure you can understand that I wasn't particularly keen on watchingthe footy with the White Van Man Gang.

With a sigh I locked up my bike a few feet from the entrance and then stepped into the fray. As the door swung open I was hit by a wall of heat and noise. I squeezed through the crowd and looked around for my brother. I couldn't find him in the main bar. Feeling somewhat exasperated I ventured into the dim back room and found him stood at the rear of a crowd facing a huge screen on which Wayne Rooney was being interviewed in the build-up to the game. There was a buzz of frenzied conversation in the room and occasionally a hoot or a shout of "Rooooooonnneeeey!!!" I felt very out of place, despite the fact that I was wearing my England shirt.

I should really point out that my issue has got nothing to do with football per se or even the particular, peculiar drunken energy that is an integral part of watching a big game of it in an English pub. It's something else - something more fundamental, about people... I can't explain it now - I'll try again in a minute.

By the time the match kicked off I was in a state of excited anticipation and had pretty much forgotten my surroundings. The only thing I was aware of apart from the football was the heat and humidity in the room - actually very similar to the conditions on the pitch in Germany, which was nice. The next ninety minutes whizzed by, we were treated to a very entertaining and tensely emotional game of football.

But I'm not here to talk about football.

At the end of the match we finished our drinks and agreed to duck into another pub for a post-match debrief and one for the road, despite the fact that the landlord was endeavouring to persuade punters to stay with an offer of four pint pitchers of Carling for a fiver. Given the ludicrous prices of beer in Bristol I was quite tempted to save myself a couple of quid and stay in the shit hole but in retrospect I'm glad I left the pub when I did.

I stepped outside into the cool evening air with a significant sense of relief. I heard shouting and the sound of blaring horns and looked to see where the disturbance was coming from. A chubby man, topless apart from an England flag which he had draped around his shoulders superman-style was staggering down the street shaking his fists and swearing at passing cars. "Fookin' loada fookin' bollox... WANKERS!" was the general tone of his profanity. I quickly lost interest in this idiot excuse for a football fan and went to collect my bike. As I approached it I became aware that it looked like it had been moved. The closer I got to it the more I became convinced that it was somehow mangled - the back wheel was bent into an alarmingly unnatural shape.

"Oh shit," I thought, "My bike's been stomped!" Sure enough, it had. I quickly deduced that the drunk football fan had clearly been so upset by the 2-2 draw with Sweden that he stormed out of the pub and decided to exact retribution on the first malleable object in his path, which happened to be my bicycle which he proceeded to jump and down on. I suppose it's fortunate the first malleable object he'd come across wasn't someone's face and that I'd timed my exit from the pub so that I didn't catch him in the act - violence would have surely ensued and I'm not very good at that sort of thing - I am after all a lover not a fighter.

As I glared up the street at the retreating hooligan I realised that I felt more resignation than anger or annoyance. I wasn't even shocked or suprised. England has it's fair share of mindless thugs who need no excuse to resort to violence, I knew that sooner or later I would be directly affected.

I was very lucky while I was travelling - I wasn't a victim of crime at any point. Well, that's not quite true. I was regularly ripped off by rickshaw drivers, shop-keepers and hotel managers but those were harmless, impersonal kinds of crimes, committed with a smile and a bow and a certain amount of earthy sophistication - I was a western tourist so I had it coming basically. The first world has been ripping off the third world for hundreds of years - those guys deserve a bit of payback, don't they? Okay, so perhaps I was more fortunate than some - of course there's crime everywhere and some particularly nasty stuff goes on in Asia - but I had to come back to England to be a victim of it.

The bike-trouncing incident was not the first incident of a crime perpetrated against me since my return to these shores. I fell foul of a dispicable coat-lifter in a nightclub during my first weekend back in Bristol. I was on top of the world, waving my hands in the air in time to some banging breaks for the first time since Goa and grinning inanely to all and sundry, my hooded top just out of my eyeline a couple of metres away on the back of a chair. I looked once - it was there. I looked twice - it was gone!

The ironic thing is that it was a really shitty hoody that I'd bought for about 200 rupees in Ooty, an old hill station in southern India. If it had been worth anything at all or I thought anyone would be remotely interested in thieving it then I would have put it in the cloak room. I didn't care about the hoody but I did care about the rather expensive pair of spectacles that were in one of it's pockets. So, possibly the only item I own that I value but had absolutely no value to anyone else in the world got stolen. How annoying is that?!

It's the sheer pointlessness of the crime that pisses me off. The drunk football hooligan who vandalised my bike had just cause - if only in his own sad, dishevelled mind, but these nightclub thieves are something else, aren't they? I mean, really, stealing something from someone just for the sake of it! Boo! Hiss! Bad form! At least drug-addicted muggers are compelled to do what they do - compelled on a rather fundamental level actually. Let's face it, it's a compunction based on a physical imperative to feed their fiendish habits - not that I'm excusing their behaviour, I'm just trying to put nightclub theft into perspective.

Well, all I can say is, "Fookin' loada fookin' bollox... WANKERS!"

Having said that, I suddenly recall an incident in a nightclub in Australia last year... suddenly the word "hypocrite" springs alarmingly to mind. At the time I'd been living in Sydney for about three months and was spending a lot of time hanging out with a weird and wonderful French girl called Coralie, who was - to be frank - a bit of a liability.

It had been a crazy kind of a night (they usually were when Coralie was about) involving great handfuls of vitamin pills washed down with copious amounts of tequila, plenty of frank sexual conversation and cigarettes, a ride with strangers in a sports car to a random, terrible house party and a circuit of about half a dozen clubs before we ended up in Susie Q's on Oxford Street at 3am. We were actually on our way out of Suzie Q's at about 5am after a good couple of hours of boozing and boogying when I noticed that Coralie was clutching a jacket in her arms.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Well my friend," she slurred, her French accent thick with booze. She looked up at me and fluttered her eyelashes, a trademark gesture. "It is a present - for you!"
"Where did you get it from?"
"In there," she said, jerking her head once toward the club's entrance, a trace of annoyance in her tone as if the question was, at best, irrelevant, and at worst, inappropriate. "I took it - a gift for you!"

Coralie was very drunk, as she later proved by bedding a weird bloke dressed up in a fairy costume (that's Oxford Street for you), which sort of excuses her. On the other hand, I was pissed but with that strange, sober edge you sometimes get after you've drunk a lot and then danced a lot. Perhaps I should have stamped my authority self-righteously on the situation and taken the coat back inside. Instead I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Thanks! Aren't you a sweetie?" I kissed her on the forehead. "Shall we go and find another party..?"

Certainly in the days which followed, during moments of remorse, I thought about taking the jacket back to the club. But it was a gift, wasn't it, even if it was a rather fucked-up, unethical kind of a gift? Oh well - the karma came back around in the end. I'd been wondering what I'd done to deserve that bit of misfortune in that Bristol nightclub. The jacket Coralie nicked was probably some poor Aussie's favourite item of clothing in the whole world.

Anyway, I've ended up going seriously off-topic here. It's time I drew some conclusions...

Okay, so I may have spent the majority of this blog ranting about thugs and hooligans in this country but I now admit that there's usually two sides to every story. Nobody's perfect. Certainly I'm not. Alcohol has a lot to answer for. It makes you do things you wouldn't, in a normal state of mind, ever consider doing. It opens the way to something reckless, vicarious, primeval even, which is inside all of us. That bloke who trounced my bike may have had a really, really bad day and he might have felt much better after venting his frustration on my back wheel. The clubber who stole my hoody may have had a jacket stolen earlier in the evening, or perhaps last year, in Sydney. Who knows?

It's terribly sad though, isn't it, that we do these things to each other? Apart from smoking the occasional spliff and indulging in the odd bit of software fraud, I'm a law-abiding citizen and quite proud of the fact. I may say, "Can you smell bacon?" whenever I see a policeman but I find their presence reassuring. God knows, it would be a Battle Royale in the centre of Bristol every Saturday night if the police weren't around. I suppose that's what I mean - all this anger and agression, fear and bigotry, frustration and repression - it seems to overflow so often and lead to senseless violence. Forget about violent criminals and terrorists, when normal people are trying to fuck each other over then what hope is there?

The depressing thing is that England isn't that much different in this regard to every other country. I know - I've checked. Although my recent hippy lifestyle has brought me into contact with a different kind of world, there is still a seething underbelly of unpleasantness that can't be ignored, even when you are meditating on a moutain like a monk. It would be tempting to just keep travelling or find somewhere I'm not confronted with these things which upset me but that would just be a form of escape, wouldn't it? It would be like saying, "I give up! I'm running to the hills! Sod the rest of you!"

Well, I love England and I love Bristol - I've had an amazing time here with friends and family since I got back and I'm not planning on going anywhere soon - I've just also got to feeling a bit depressed about some of the mindlessness I've witnessed here. I know when I get badly drunk I lose the plot and end up stumbling around making terrible decisions, but when I was travelling I started to feel like I could be something more and that's what I'm striving for now - that's what I'm trying to express here. I'm sure it's a feeling that resonates with many of you.

Pint of vodka anyone?

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