Disenfranchised

As the poem says
“Hot July brings cooling showers, apricots and Gilly flowers”
It also brings more festivals and community events than you can wave a stick at.
Saturday found me slogging around the Hillview festival in Kings Cross.
Not a bad event as housing estate community festivals go, the usual stalls selling buns, cakes and samosas [samosii?] It also had the digest, smokiest BBQ in the world. I don’t think the Bismarck laid down a smokescreen like that!
The smokescreen added to the tears of sundry Bengali youths [Bengali is the name by which they describe themselves, the closest any of them have ever been to Bengal is when they head east, along Pentonville Road, to the curry house, they’re really British].
The “Coram Street massive” think they look more like hard-line gangsters if they shamble around with scowls that could sour milk.
It annoys me.
“Don’t you ever smile?”
“Fuck off you racist cunt”
“Why do you always look so miserable?”
“Coz it’s shit, init”
What’s shit?”
“This” [meaning the whole festival]
“What’s shit about it?”
“It’s all for Pakis”
Sometimes, you just can’t win!
This from a fourteen-year-old kid of Bengali origin [going back a couple of generations] whose one aim in life is to be a Jamaican yardie and because he isn’t, blames everybody else.
A comparable situation……
When I was fourteen I realised that Leeds was a shithouse [not that it took much realising] ergo, I decided to get out at the earliest opportunity. Don’t worry, this is not going to be one of these stories of the poor kid who does well at school goes down to the smoke and makes good.
I had this horrible vision that if I didn’t get out of Leeds, then in twenty years time I would be stuck in a dead end job, only enough money to pay for my 60 cigs and 10 pints per day and a Gerry Springer Show wife from hell [+ kids] and not being able to be the [out] out and out queer that I am.
Well, I did it, bunked from Leeds, went and did sundry different things in sundry different places.
Me, been there, done that.
Salim, never been out of Kings Cross.
The only think that’s keeping him there is peer pressure. Being the gangster that he is, he hasn’t the courage to say to his “homies” “ ta ta guys, see you in twenty years when you’re still here sitting in the pub complaining that there’s nowhere to go & nothing to do”Some people just can’t see beyond the end of their own street.