Where does the Big Society stand on the screamers on the bus? We had one the other day. It was during the rush hour, and I was late to pick up my daughter from the nursery. It was a big lady, heavily upholstered in beige, dragging a trolley almost the same size which was upholstered in tartan. The bus jolted, she almost fell, and we all rushed to help her, like David Cameron surely reckons we’re supposed to. That should have been that. The next time the bus stopped, though, she was off up the aisle, trolley battering through plenty of people older and fatter than her, to shriek at the driver. Leave it, love, said some. It’s busy, he didn’t mean it, no harm done, we all want to get home.
But she was a screamer. Poor woman. None of us had realised. All around the bus, you could see, passengers were listening, noting that her grievances were not entirely bus-based, and letting themselves clang shut. We were all enemies, even those of us who’d helped her up. The bus stopped and sank with a sigh, the doors opened, and commuters stared at their feet or out the window, bleakly revising their short-term plans. And suddenly, through the shouting, and with a jolt, I realised that Margaret Thatcher might have had a point.
‘Any man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus,’ she genuinely once said, ‘can count himself as a failure.’ Her position on my screamer would have been clear and coherent, even if unhelpful. That screamer wasn’t society’s problem, in her view, but mine. I’ll be 34 in a couple of months. I’m a failure. Screamers are just what you get.
John Major would have cared about my screamer on the bus, but only to the extent of setting up a phoneline whereby those exposed to screamers on buses could complain about them. Alas, only screamers on buses would ever have called it. ‘Tough on screamers,’ Tony Blair would have said, ‘tough on the causes of screamers.’ Maybe he’d have invited some to No. 10 for a cocktail party with Noel Gallagher. Appointed a Screamer Tsar. There would have been special Asbos for screamers on the bus, and other Asbos for people who cracked and screamed back. That might actually have helped, but it’s a strategy strictly for a boom.
Gordon Brown would have thrown more money at the problem, nonetheless. Bus screamer tax credits? Whole special buses for the screamers on the bus? That sort of thing. He’d probably have published figures showing that screamers on bus quotas had declined in real terms, but all of us, even the screamers on buses, would know this was a lie.
Had screamers on buses become an electoral issue, Labour would have trumpeted their screamer success, nonetheless. The Liberal Democrats would have declared themselves, nationally, to be progressively on the side of the screamers on the bus, but locally told non-screaming voters on buses that they were going to have all the screamers on buses locked up.
And David Cameron’s Conservatives? As far as I can make out, the Big Society says we all ought to hug the screamers on the buses, and the whole phenomenon will somehow disappear. But come on. That’s never going to work. These are society’s most vulnerable, and they need to be properly looked after. Just not by me, preferably, in the rush hour, en route to the nursery. Because in such a situation, just like anybody else, I’m only going to think ‘screamer’ and try to get away. If top Tories spent more time on buses, they’d realise this. Not being failures, though, I doubt they ever do.
I have an unexpected social dilemma. It’s nothing big, and I feel quite absurd even mentioning it at the bottom of a column about the plight of the impoverished mentally ill. Still, it’s been preoccupying me, like things sometimes do. You see, I’ve just moved house, and the taps in the bathroom in the new place all have my initials on them. Yeah. Think about that.
It’s a trademark of some sort. It’s nothing to do with me, I swear. But when people come round and happen to use the bathroom, they’re not always going to realise that. I’m really not the sort of person who would have personally embossed taps. There are few things I believe about my own personality, fundamentally, but that is very much one of them. I’m more troubled than I like to admit by the thought of visitors going into my loo, thinking, ‘blimey, I never realised he was such a flash prick’, and then mentioning it to each other when they get home.
What would you do? They’re really nice taps, initials aside. If I got them replaced, I couldn’t afford anything half as pretty. Plus, the wife would never stand for it. Plus, you can’t go spending a stupid amount of money getting taps replaced just because you don’t want people to think you spent a stupid amount of money on taps. If that got out, it would be even worse.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for The Times.
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