2012? You Sure...?

I went to watch some Olympic football yesterday evening. Not at the actual venue (Old Trafford), just in a pub in the centre of the town where I’m now (temporarily) residing. Yep, Team GB took to the field to take on the might of, erm, Senegal in their first game of the 2012 Olympics. As expected, it was a pretty boring game, especially seeing as Team GB is basically England Lite: A team made up of predominantly English footballers who weren’t good enough to be included in the shambolic line-up that Roy Hodgson took to the Euros...but with Ryan Giggs and Craig Bellamy thrown in just to qualify is as Team GB, and not England Lite. Just to be clear. Team GB, not England Lite. It ended 1-1 after Craig Bellamy’s well taken volley was cancelled out by a late Senegal equaliser. I didn’t see the equaliser though, as I’d left the pub and gone home by that point. Why? I’ll tell you:  It was down to the almost constant torrent of foul racist language, broadcast without any embarrassment, by quite a few members of the other inhabitants of the pub. I was disgusted, yes, but most of all I was disappointed. Disappointed that this kind of thing is still happening in today’s supposedly multi-cultural society.

A number of comments, ranging from laughing at Senegalese players’ names, to the berating of the black Team GB players, to the discussing of why these same black players shouldn’t be playing for Team GB were all flung about the bar. I suspect the vast majority of the people coming out with this drivel were pissed, as most of them looked like they’d been drinking in the sun all day, and not y’know, working. The generally tanned appearance of their tattooed arms and necks combined with the kind of slurred speech only attainable through sinking 12 pints of Strongbow in the afternoon sun gave the game away. What I guess I’m trying to say is that last night’s events told me all I needed to know about the town I’m (temporarily) residing in. Here we are, on the eve of the fucking Olympic Games, in the year 2012 and there are still people who think it’s either funny or clever to be openly racist. It makes me ashamed to be British that all the peoples of the world descend on these Isles, and are welcomed with open arms, when just under the crust, intense hatred bubbles away.

 It gets worse, by the way – before I’d even heard any of the shit coming from the amoebas dotted around the bar, I’d picked up a local newspaper that had been left on a nearby table. I opened it up to find that somebody had scrawled  in biro “dirty cheating paki’s” (sic) above a photograph of two muslim men who had been charged with benefit fraud or something. Now, I’m not Dr Watson (he was always the brains behind the Baker St operation), but I’ll wager that the person who wrote that delightful message doesn’t work either. And probably lives on benefits (possibly fraudulently). And is probably on the same intellectual level as the arseholes who think it’s funny to shout racist comments across a bar in 2012. How do I know this? Well, the crossword in the paper had been attempted and given up on (and most of the answers given were wrong anyway), and the jobs section at the back had a few pen marks around several labouring positions on offer, as well as a few scribbles and doodles in the page margin.

So to surmise, your honour: racist, uneducated and either out of work or looking to change professional direction. And I’m guessing that due to the location of the evidence (a fucking pub) it’s the former of the last point rather than the latter.

So there we are. Racism is alive and kicking in the town where I am currently (temporarily) residing. I totally understand that this incident (I’ll combine the newspaper and the comments as one occurrence to save space) is not indicative of the whole of our island nation’s society/values/beliefs etc, but it’s a little bit worrying given the fact that the motherfucking Olympics is being held a few hundred miles away. Thankfully, I’m only in this town temporarily and will be making an effort to relocate to a more cosmopolitan city as soon as is convenient. But not London. Too busy and full of fucking foreigners (see below).