As an oldster, I am supremely fortunate in the youngsters who form part of my social set. They are kind, intelligent, affable, modest, devout, polite, well-dressed and generally calm. A few of the youngest are greatly addicted to cookies, of course, but as they age they learn to hide their inordinate desire for sugar and then to limit themselves to a biscuit or two. I like to think that Mr McLean and I would have had such excellent children, had God granted us offspring of our own.
Since these paragons are almost always the only children I see, the behaviour of unattended young strangers on the bus comes as a terrible shock. All winter long I took various busses to swing dance events without seeing many teenagers on the bus, but now that spring is here, the local youth, some wearing half-masks, have emerged from hibernation.
On Saturday evening I was nonplussed to see a great gang of them congregating at a bus stop where gangs do tend to gather in summer, the girls wearing their uniform of ironed hair and black leggings, the boys with their hoods pulled up. A goodly number of each clambered on the bus, shouting at each other in Edinburgh accents thick as porridge. When the boys mocked the girls, the girls scolded, but, I was relieved to see, everyone kept their hands to themselves. It was not exactly pleasant, but it wasn’t as bad as Wednesday evening’s scene.
On Wednesday evening I was travelling by another bus when some equally noisy youngsters boarded. The girls had ironed hair and leggings, and the boys had their hoods pulled up. However, these youngsters were clearly not Scottish, and they seemed to be yelling at each other in a Romance language, probably Spanish. And when one of the boys sat down, he reached out and grabbed one of the girls, forcing her to sit beside him. Another girl sat next to me until someone threw headphones at her. She got up, picked them up, and then sat by a window, soon joined by another boy.
I seem to spend more and more of my public life doing risk assessments. Scottish youngsters goofing around, I understand. I know when not to go through certain neighbourhoods on certain evenings (e.g. Niddrie on Bonfire Night), and I know that Scottish women, when drunk and disorderly, can be more dangerous than the men. However, I did not understand the antics of these fellow foreigners, or what made the boys think they could yank and clutch the girls like fruit from a tree. I wondered where the girls’ parents were, and if they knew their daughters were being treated like that.
Suddenly there was a squawk and a new torrent of Spanish-sounding yelling, and all the other women on the bus and I turned to see the second girl trying to move out of her seat while being restrained by the junior moustachioed thug trying to keep her there. And that, dear friends, is really not okay behaviour in Edinburgh. Being noisy is simply inconsiderate. Laying hands on young women makes old women here really mad.
“What do you think you are doing?” I shouted. “Leave that girl alone.”
And then, in a manner completely foreign to Edinburgh life, I stood up and started shouting at the driver that there was a young lady being manhandled at the back of his bus.
Naturally, he did not stop, so I got up to remonstrate with him by his window.
“Puta,” the young man spat in my direction.
“Ha,” I snorted.
“There’s not really anything I can do,” said the bus driver. “Are they Eastern Europeans?”
Poor Poles, I thought, although perhaps “Eastern European” is the bus company’s catch-all phrase for less familiar ex-pats.
“Southern Europeans,” said that world-famous linguist, Mrs McLean, and sat behind the driver with her phone in her hand ready to film the miscreant, lest he be tempted to punch her on his way out. In the back a Scottish woman began to tick off the group for being “disrespectful.”
As it happened, the young man and girl decided to alight from the bus earlier than their companions did, and as they both seemed unhappy to see me with my phone out, I began to reassess their relationship. Perhaps in their city (wherever it might be; the sun never sets on the Romance Language Empire), all that grabbing, restraining and yelling is normal to young love. Be that as it may, it is still offensive to bus-riders in Edinburgh. A British young woman, traveling with a scholarly-looking black man, gave me an approving smile as they themselves alighted.
Some might consider my outburst “Karen” behaviour. A “Karen”, I gather from social media, is a middle-aged white woman who gets angry when something meets her disapproval instead of meekly cowering or obligingly dying of old age right there and then. The use of term is sexist, racist, ageist and, of course, deeply offensive to both women named Karen and the Karen peoples of Burma, whom it effectively erases. All things considered, I would prefer to be called a puta (or putana, or putain) than a Karen. But naturally I would prefer to be called any name rather than be too cowardly to protest the mistreatment of a girl on public transit.
Meanwhile, I have bought a new-to-me new formal dress for the Michaelmas Dance in five months. It has arrived, and it fits but—alas—its V-shaped neckline cuts rather too low for traditional modesty. Thus, I will have to find some nice lace or velvet the same colour and sew it in.
Leave a Reply