bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel

I’m sure most of us have at one time or other accidentally started a riot, and I found myself discussing my experience in ths area over the weekend. This is a bit of a cheat of a blog, as I wrote it in my Livejournal at the time, but as far as I am aware there is no law against plagarising yourself, so I am going to write it again here:

I was quietly minding my own business on the train coming back from trading at Camden, when at Ealing Broadway a load of Chelsea piled on being generally loud and boisterous. Not behaving in an especially aggressive way, just making a lot of noise and being a bit lairy between themselves. A couple of anti West Ham chants (I was wearing a West Ham shirt) but nothing especially nasty. Mainly, a reworking of the Oliver Twist classic Chim Chimeny, with the line about sweeps replaced with ‘We hate those bastards in claret and blue’. Ideally, I would have responded with a common reworking of the Crystal’s nonsensical 1963 hit Da Do Ron Ron, with the the chorus changed to ‘The Chelsea run run, the Chelsea run’, but I would have felt a bit strange launching into it on my own. As creative as football chants can be, they are not ideally suited to solo rendition. Anyway, things escalate a bit, until inevitably one of them chucks an empty can at one of the others. Then they are all throwing stuff at each other. You might already see where this is going.

[Scuffling with Read More at this point will reveal clever tricks for out thinking would-be assailants at suburban train stations]

I’m aware all this is going on, but it is sufficiently far away down the carriage to not pose any personal threat. Suddenly, however, a half full can of lager, thrown deliberately or not, just misses me, rebounding off the wall and landing on my leg. This presents me with a bit of a dilemma: they have all seen this happen, so I am going to be a target for Christ knows what if I let it go. On the other hand, I am outnumbered 8 to 1, and at the very end of the train with no avenue of retreat. Anyway, I decided I was having none of it, so I lobbed the can back in a high arc, to see what would happen next. What happened next was that it smacked straight into the side of the head of one of these blokes. There was a pregnant pause, then it all went a bit mental, and I’ve got a load of highly annoyed Chelsea all giving it plenty, which for the reader unschooled in scuffling vernacular means that they were highly agitated and advancing in a threatening manner.

I wasn’t overly concerned – well, I was concerned enough to not choose that moment for a bit of a nap or anything – because if it’s barking it isn’t biting, and if it comes to fisticuffs, they have to come at me along the aisle, so it’ll only be one at a time. I’d already got my eye on an empty bottle of Oasis, and would just have glassed the first one to come within range. A quick glassing usually makes an assailant think again, and in any case if it had ever came to court I was so outnumbered as to effectively have diplomatic immunity. For the time being, however, I just wanted to keep my nice defensive position. Remember Bannockburn, 1314, Agincourt, 1415, Rorke’s Drift 1892: if you don’t have the numbers, you must have the ground. Go on, remember them.

After something of a stand off they start chucking literally anything that they can find up the carriage – bottles, coins, you name it – with me returning fire as best I can. They were throwing the seats at one point. It’s actually quite hard to hit someone with a thrown object in a train carriage, as all the racks and stuff get in the way. However, no one wants a coin in the retina, so I am trying to coax them forward but they aren’t having it. This generally is the way with Chelsea.

Happily, at this point, the train gets to Maidenhead, where I was living at the time, and off I jump. Unhappily, so do they, so my ground advantage is lost. Happily, the platform is packed, so I am able to mingle with the crowd. Unhappily, they just charge straight through. I leg it down the steps, briskly but not running, as we can’t have West Ham running from Chelsea, especially as the station is bound to be camera’d up and so they are unlikely to try anything. Despite having a ticket I jumped the barriers in the ticket hall, knowing that this would get the attention of the guards, and – saints be praised! – there is a taxi bang outside the station doors. In I hop, while they are being held up by station staff who – and this is the clever bit of my barrier jumping rouse – think that they are mates of mine who are also fare dodging. The cab drives me the quarter mile home, and in five minutes I am having a nice cup of tea in my living roon while my pursuers are being questioned by the Transport Police. A good result in the end, but a bit more exciting than any train journey really needs to be.

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