Sidestreets and Shadows
February is a cruel month and nobody knows what it is for. This year, the bad noise began on the ‘b’ of the bang, in the earliest hours of the first of the month.
Indeed...a drop of acid has been added to our sleepy well of complacency. On Tuesday night two large men attempted to mug my flatmate. He was walking home from the tube station just after midnight, and they struck half way up our road. These opportunist thugs were after his rucksack...but he has been practicing martial arts for many years and fought them off whilst, in his own words, “going off like a car alarm”, shouting for help. They ran off down a sidestreet empty-handed. Shaken, my flatmate sought help from the nearest house.
“Sorry we’re not much use,” said the first guy. “I’m afraid we’ve just smoked a gigantic spliff.”
“Yeah,” added the second.
They called the police...and I do not envy them having to do whilst twisted on something so conductive to paranoid thoughts...a bad case of turkeys voting for Christmas.
“Hello...er...is this the police people?” one would say.
“Yes sir, this is them. What is your emergency?”
He tries not to giggle. “Somewhere here’s been attacked on our doorstep.”
“Right, stay calm. Could you give me your address, sir?”
“Ooh, good question,” he says. The line goes quiet as the other feeds him the address, holding back laughter. With difficulty he repeats the address to the disembodied voice on the end of the line, who acknowledges each line with a curt “mm”.
“Right, stay there, we’re on our way.”
There is a pregnant pause.
“I’m not on drugs! You can’t prove a thing!”
“Sir? Could you repeat that, sir?”
Click, brrr.
Soon enough the police arrived and brought him home. From the subsequent discussion he found out that this area is a hotspot for this kind of crime...and this is information that you never find out about an area unless it happens to someone you know. Never mind your Internet discussion boards and your personal recommendations, the police are the ones with the meat.
This strange episode should worry me more than it does. I do not regard the area any differently to what I did before since I never held any illusions about the possibility of local crime. But I now feel justified in the caution I have taken in recent weeks when out at night on the moonlit streets. As my flatmate said, “it’s a wake-up call.”
Even after talking about this with him I am unsure as to how he is reacting internally to this. My own encounter with an attempted mugging many years ago in Sheffield was similiar in a way. Briefly, a burly guy took a fancy to my four quid watch in a failed attempt at impressing the two girls he was with. The memory of this helps me to understand Tuesday’s attack to some extent, but something he said to me was a little surprising. Since he was able to back off a little and find space to use his martial art skills, he was genuinely pissed off when the attackers ran off and he didn’t get a chance at a counterattack that would have inflicted some serious damage on them.
No, strike that. I can understand entirely...it is a more immediate version of the revenge fantasy, the looping tape in the head that replays false versions of the past that grant us the victory. Most of us would in respect imagine what the encounter would have been like if only they had the skills and had beaten them to shit. Here we are only concerned with the latter part.
In some small way we all do this. When the curtains are drawn and the lights are off and the air is stuffy on a midsummer’s night...we lie on our beds and pick apart old arguments, coming up with great responses that we wish we had said at the time, ones that would make us undisputed champion of verbal sparring. This assumes there is victory in argument, but there is normally nothing but bitter failure on both sides, and to hell with who got the last word. The real enemy is the anger the encounter rouses. So long as this resentfulness over the argument remains -- a mental blockage that is frequently impossible to clear -- well, you lose, buddy.
Even a genuine victory in argument...a rare fish indeed...can feel false and guilt-ridden, and this is so whenever you know your opponent. Only the mouthy stranger on the train whom you beat like a gong with your grace and wit can make you feel unreservedly elated. Which offers us, bizarrely, a cunning trick that is worth remembering when deep in the mire of argument. This is the total retraction and admittance of defeat that, nevertheless, paints you as an oasis of conciliatory wisdom, and also allows that most devious of subtle counterattacks...something along the lines of “...and I presume you are enough of a gentleman to accept my apology.” This is most effective in front of an audience. Remember that your aim is not to admit that you were wrong but to appear above such petty bickering. Besides...you’re not wrong here, are you? It’s them. After all, other people never argue the facts, they just use clever little tricks packed with hidden fallacies...a subject we have been over before.
My immediate boss was talking about these tricks the other day, relating to the previous day in which he was called to the stand during a work tribunal. He said how the barrister used the trick of missing information...the out of context question to which you are only allowed to answer “Yes” or “No.”
To paraphrase his point using my own example:
Barrister: Is it true that you never tried to kill Hitler?”
Witness: Don’t be ridiculous, that was 60 years ago, I wasn’t even ali...
Barrister: Yes or No?
Witness: Yes.
Barrister: A-ha!
Now, if martial arts were allowed in the courtroom, then we may begin to believe in justice again.
Well, I have no idea what that means, but what the hell. I have never seen the inside of a courtroom for myself and hope I never do. Most arguments and indeed physical attacks can be avoided with a certain vigilance of word and deed...this is the price of peace, as has been pointed out by many people through the ages. Provided we learn the lessons and learn them well whenever they come along...well, we may not be completely safe, but the percentages will not be stacked so overwhelmingly against us in future.
Or we could all carry knives and guns, of course. And what a peaceful world this would then be...
Indeed...a drop of acid has been added to our sleepy well of complacency. On Tuesday night two large men attempted to mug my flatmate. He was walking home from the tube station just after midnight, and they struck half way up our road. These opportunist thugs were after his rucksack...but he has been practicing martial arts for many years and fought them off whilst, in his own words, “going off like a car alarm”, shouting for help. They ran off down a sidestreet empty-handed. Shaken, my flatmate sought help from the nearest house.
“Sorry we’re not much use,” said the first guy. “I’m afraid we’ve just smoked a gigantic spliff.”
“Yeah,” added the second.
They called the police...and I do not envy them having to do whilst twisted on something so conductive to paranoid thoughts...a bad case of turkeys voting for Christmas.
“Hello...er...is this the police people?” one would say.
“Yes sir, this is them. What is your emergency?”
He tries not to giggle. “Somewhere here’s been attacked on our doorstep.”
“Right, stay calm. Could you give me your address, sir?”
“Ooh, good question,” he says. The line goes quiet as the other feeds him the address, holding back laughter. With difficulty he repeats the address to the disembodied voice on the end of the line, who acknowledges each line with a curt “mm”.
“Right, stay there, we’re on our way.”
There is a pregnant pause.
“I’m not on drugs! You can’t prove a thing!”
“Sir? Could you repeat that, sir?”
Click, brrr.
Soon enough the police arrived and brought him home. From the subsequent discussion he found out that this area is a hotspot for this kind of crime...and this is information that you never find out about an area unless it happens to someone you know. Never mind your Internet discussion boards and your personal recommendations, the police are the ones with the meat.
This strange episode should worry me more than it does. I do not regard the area any differently to what I did before since I never held any illusions about the possibility of local crime. But I now feel justified in the caution I have taken in recent weeks when out at night on the moonlit streets. As my flatmate said, “it’s a wake-up call.”
Even after talking about this with him I am unsure as to how he is reacting internally to this. My own encounter with an attempted mugging many years ago in Sheffield was similiar in a way. Briefly, a burly guy took a fancy to my four quid watch in a failed attempt at impressing the two girls he was with. The memory of this helps me to understand Tuesday’s attack to some extent, but something he said to me was a little surprising. Since he was able to back off a little and find space to use his martial art skills, he was genuinely pissed off when the attackers ran off and he didn’t get a chance at a counterattack that would have inflicted some serious damage on them.
No, strike that. I can understand entirely...it is a more immediate version of the revenge fantasy, the looping tape in the head that replays false versions of the past that grant us the victory. Most of us would in respect imagine what the encounter would have been like if only they had the skills and had beaten them to shit. Here we are only concerned with the latter part.
In some small way we all do this. When the curtains are drawn and the lights are off and the air is stuffy on a midsummer’s night...we lie on our beds and pick apart old arguments, coming up with great responses that we wish we had said at the time, ones that would make us undisputed champion of verbal sparring. This assumes there is victory in argument, but there is normally nothing but bitter failure on both sides, and to hell with who got the last word. The real enemy is the anger the encounter rouses. So long as this resentfulness over the argument remains -- a mental blockage that is frequently impossible to clear -- well, you lose, buddy.
Even a genuine victory in argument...a rare fish indeed...can feel false and guilt-ridden, and this is so whenever you know your opponent. Only the mouthy stranger on the train whom you beat like a gong with your grace and wit can make you feel unreservedly elated. Which offers us, bizarrely, a cunning trick that is worth remembering when deep in the mire of argument. This is the total retraction and admittance of defeat that, nevertheless, paints you as an oasis of conciliatory wisdom, and also allows that most devious of subtle counterattacks...something along the lines of “...and I presume you are enough of a gentleman to accept my apology.” This is most effective in front of an audience. Remember that your aim is not to admit that you were wrong but to appear above such petty bickering. Besides...you’re not wrong here, are you? It’s them. After all, other people never argue the facts, they just use clever little tricks packed with hidden fallacies...a subject we have been over before.
My immediate boss was talking about these tricks the other day, relating to the previous day in which he was called to the stand during a work tribunal. He said how the barrister used the trick of missing information...the out of context question to which you are only allowed to answer “Yes” or “No.”
To paraphrase his point using my own example:
Barrister: Is it true that you never tried to kill Hitler?”
Witness: Don’t be ridiculous, that was 60 years ago, I wasn’t even ali...
Barrister: Yes or No?
Witness: Yes.
Barrister: A-ha!
Now, if martial arts were allowed in the courtroom, then we may begin to believe in justice again.
Well, I have no idea what that means, but what the hell. I have never seen the inside of a courtroom for myself and hope I never do. Most arguments and indeed physical attacks can be avoided with a certain vigilance of word and deed...this is the price of peace, as has been pointed out by many people through the ages. Provided we learn the lessons and learn them well whenever they come along...well, we may not be completely safe, but the percentages will not be stacked so overwhelmingly against us in future.
Or we could all carry knives and guns, of course. And what a peaceful world this would then be...
posted by Jamie at 7:40 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home