When Good Parents Go Bad

I saw a particularly nasty thing on the bus last night. It offended all of my bourgeois middle class sensibilities and it awoke my raging prejudice against parents with small children.

Getting onto a crowded bus on the way home from work I saw a little old lady trying to battle her way off. She had a pair of walking sticks that she leaned heavily on to help her walk and she was obviously having some difficulty. Most people at the bus stop noticed her too and we all stood aside to let her pass.

Yes, I said most. The exception to this was a father who can’t have been much older than 30 with his small child of 4 or 5 by the hand. He elbowed past us, pushing the child ahead of him with the words “come on now [Bobby]” and simply shoved the old lady out of his way. She stumbled against the side of the bus and another passenger helped her up again.

Without a word, the man and his child vanished into the bus, leaving only a closed mass of shoulders and backs behind them.

It reminded me of something I saw a couple of weeks ago in Giraffe in Clapham. (To be fair, I should have known better than to go to Giraffe, that haunt of spoilt brats and vile parents London-wide.) A waitress was standing by one of the tables in the crowded thoroughfare, taking the table’s order and blocking the narrow passage as she did. Into the restaurant walked a mother pushing a pram with a small child asleep in it. The mother waved at someone at the back of the restaurant and walked up to the waitress, who she’d have to pass to reach her friends. Did she ask her to move? Did she hell. Instead she gathered speed and simply rammed her pram into the waitress’s calves, not once – which might have been an accident – but twice. Twice!

Even if you haven't encountered the extremes above yourself I’m sure you’ve been pushed into the gutter by two parents with buggies stalking side-by-side along the pavement. Seriously, what is it with these people? Do they forget that there are other people out there in the world? Has no-one told them that having children does not give them the right to barge helter-skelter through the world without a single common courtesy? People have been having kids for a while now – it doesn’t make you all that special, my friend.

The whole thing makes me wish I could carry a cattle prod in my handbag. Then I, too, could be the bringer of instant karma.