Wednesday 7 July 2010

A Gentler Age.

There’s a lot of concern in Britain that the town and city centres are becoming no-go areas at night. The streets are awash with hideously drunken young people fighting, vomiting, urinating, falling over, wandering in front of traffic, and so on.

My mother used to tell me that when my granddad was a young man, he and his friends went for a pub crawl, got a good skinful, and then gathered under a street light to sing ‘I’m a poor little lamb that has lost his way. Bah, bah, bah.’

In harmony.

And they still got moved on by the police.

Don’t times change?

6 comments:

mxtodis123 said...

Times certainly do change. New York City was such a different place when I moved here 40 years ago. I used to hang out all night in Washington Square Park....used to go in when the sun came up. Now it is so dangerous out there that they lock the parks up at 10 pm.
Mary

JJ said...

But did you sing silly songs, Mary? And did you read my post about walking across the lower West Side between 11 and midnight - and getting away with it? That was round about then.

Lovely to hear from you.

Carmen said...

haha that sounds like a good song. did you ever do anything like that?

JJ said...

Not quite, Carms. I was one of the rugby-playing fraternity. We used to get kicked out of pubs for singing bawdy songs.

rebel_of_nowhere said...

Definitely not hanging out late around here...but it's been like that as far as I can remember.

JJ said...

Well, as usual there are conflicting agendas going on. The government likes to pretend they're concerned about this sort of thing because most people daren't go into the town and city centres any more. At the same time they want to encourage the drinks industry to sell, sell, and sell some more because it's 'good for the economy.'

We had this problem in a town where I used to live. The police went public and admitted they were losing control of the streets. Beatings and stabbing were becoming commonplace. A local councillor also went public and said the town benefited from the proliferation of cafe bars and nightclubs because - guess what - it was 'good for the local economy.'

It's yet another reason why I dislike free market economies.