views on casual racism that prevails in cornwall

Bunch of decrepit, mumbling, miserable, bastards do they not have homes. They’ll frequent every bus stop between here and john o groats with their idle diatribes upon the lives of the drivers, and their caps that inform me that they’d rather be fishing. And their blue rinsed, coffee stained, mole ridden heads with the bumbling enunciation that trips over its self on its stealthy exit through the corner of their perennially glistening mouths. They feel the need to interminably inquire about information as though the signs and official documents, and testimonies of others are all one giant conspiracy that the whole fucking charade partakes in to deceive them. So they’ll stroll up to the drivers cabin ask him where’s going six times, demand an affirmation whilst tutting at his lack of courtesy upon providing the same answer for the sixth time and then they’ll walk away. Once the slab of bigoted farmer with white hair spiralling out of his ears like smoke from a burning house, gets down to the seat in front of me he shifts his titanic plaid-festooned load in pursuit of a comfort which will never be rewarded him from a seat patently so constrictive. Infuriated by the impunity of seat-designers in the 21^st century this man turns to his wife crammed into the window seat beside him in her pink cardigan, and begins to incoherently conspire into her similarly hairy ear whilst gesturing with his giant orange paw towards the women in the aisle ahead. I detect one word from the slobbering drivel that he pours in her ear (given the proximity I unfortunately hold to the couple) ‘…paki’, at the sound of which his wife contorts her rubbery features into a stern expression of agreement. Still shifting the plaid monolith begins to track glances at the girl with what his elephantine presence evidently deems to be refinement although its nothing of the kind, whilst his wife abandons any such tact to align her malevolent sneer permanently on the girl, who having detected the farmer and his wife’s attentions shuffles tighter in next to the window and adjusts her headphones.

By this point I’ve become inadvertently marooned within the feeble territory of the passive-aggressive British liberal predicament, too infuriated that two people could continue to harbour such intolerance having endured a lifetime of cultural integration initiatives to not intervene whilst aware that any intervention or accusation I will make will be misconstrued, caught in my throat, vigorously denied or cited as article one in the list of evidence to prove that I should mind my own fucking business. I look around; the man who’d rather be fishing adjusts his cap and plucks absent-mindedly at a brow that slopes forth like a wisteria adorned porch, the lady with the parted hair sits behind him engrossed in a paper by a Murdoch demagogue. Where’s my alibi? No else has noticed, perhaps once more I am joining arbitrary dots to while away time on a bus journey. After all perhaps I misinterpreted their slur as anything other than the ‘affectionate moniker’ that people of such esteem and impeccable upbringing as our own future monarch use (grandfathered, let it not be disavowed, by the best, the most chummily recognised and affirmed of our high-profile bigots!) I am prized from my meander through the outlandish and wittily phrased eye-openers I am imagining delivering to the couple by the announcement that I’ve almost reached my stop. Am I not colluding with them in a sense by instantly reaching the judgement that their gestures, points, mutters and grimaces where anything other than the entirely innocent responses of those who have lived more secular, guarded lives shielded from multiculturalism when confronted by somewhere of Pakistani origin? No of course not, I resolve, if people have fastidiously preserved the ‘no blacks, no dogs’ mantra of the 1940’s into the modern age whilst being all to willing to adapt their ever widening range of appliances, subscriptions and technologies then I can not exploit that loophole as a way of avoiding confrontation. Why not amend some of their archaic preconceptions about the world. Surveying them for an instance, I am once more caught by the demand that liberal righteous indignation has for them to do something more overt, to transparently expose their bigotry to the whole carriage, to vent out loud the words bellowed from their gestures, I become perturbed by how the very idea commands a strange excitement. Blighted once more by middle-class passivity and the perverse chokehold of manners I resist subjecting them to this auto de fé because I talk myself into taking proverbs about not teaching old dogs new tricks as sacrosanct when in reality its because I’m all too willing to recount my offence right now across this page but couldn’t muster the courage to reprimand someone for an insinuation. I left only shooting them a look of disapproval and the girl a look of camaraderie, which I instantly regretted, and spent the whole journey home dwelling on my course of action, where I now sat down and wrote up what I was sanctimonious enough to think but to cowardly to voice.