Page 12 - Julie Thorley Nine Lives book

Antisocial Behaviour
starting to lose the will to live. He took my card off me, had
a cursory rummage in the trays of undeliverables, and then, without even looking at me, said: ‘‘S not back yet. Try tomorrer.’
I’m afraid I might have raised my voice when I called
him an unhelpful oaf and demanded to see the manager. Unfortunately, it turned out he was the manager, so I was stymied. There was nothing I could do except summon up what little dignity I had left and walk out.
I know, I know: it doesn’t sound very much; but he was just the latest in a string of people not being, you know, just decent and nice. I’m sick and tired of folk who don’t toe the line, who actually enjoy going over the line because they know they won’t get caught, and there’s nothing anybody can say or do to make them behave any better. They just keep getting away with it.
It’s like those litterbugs that drop their burger wrappers. I’ve tried telling them, but they won’t pick them up. And those sel sh so-and-sos who park on yellow lines with their hazard lights on, because that makes it all right, and anyway they know there is only one traf c warden in the entire borough and the chances of them getting a ticket are virtually non-existent. And people who don’t clean up their dog mess because, as one woman put it to me the other day, ‘Who’s gonna make me – you?’
I could go on.
Anyway, I was in a right old state when I left the sorting of ce and I’d got all this other stuff going round in my head. I was having a chunter to myself as I set off back through the pedestrianised part of the shopping precinct.
And that’s when it happened. There was one of those lorry things coming towards me – pickup trucks are they called? He shouldn’t have been driving there at all. It’s pedestrians only between 8 and 6 and he was coming at a fair old lick. We locked eyes and I could tell he had no intention of stopping. Well, that day he’d made the wrong choice.
I kept walking and he kept coming; he jinked to one side and I went the same way; he jinked back again and so did I. Eventually he had to stop. He wound down his window, gestured
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