I was walking down our road yesterday. A full-on goth girl was walking in the opposite direction. As I watched her, familiar thoughts started to circle around my head, ‘How long does it take her to get ready in the mornings? How long does it take her remove her makeup at night? Does she even bother taking it off at night or does she just go to bed like that? Did she become a goth because she is into whatever it is Goths are into or is it because one day she realised that no matter what anyone says, nothing tackles teenage acne better than a tub of white paint smeared generously on the face?’
But then I felt an unfamiliar thought entering my head and that was that despite all the efforts she had gone to, to look threatening or rebellious, to me she just looked, well sweet I guess!
This surprised me of course but then when I thought about it I noticed that somewhere along the line, goths had lost all their credibility as scary freaks and had simply become our sweet friends with a liking for makeup and black clothes!
When I thought about it some more I realised that this feeling affectionate to a group of people that we generally found threatening, was not specific to goths, the same could also be said about Punks, Skinheads, football hooligans, white-trash teenagers hanging out by the landmark of the Great Standing Discarded Refrigerator; spitting, effing and blinding and beating old ladies. O how we love’em all nowadays. And how beautiful and friendly they look to us since the emergence of the suicide bombers.
At least with this lot we know what they are about. Football hooligans for example. Those guys are just the best. They like football, beer and beating people up. Mix those three together and you have yourself one happy football hooligan. I know they can be a bit of a handful sometimes but what can you do? Boys will be boys.
On the other hand we have these suicide bombers that no one even knows what they want. They kill people but it’s not because they are drunk or need money to go and buy booze or purely that they don’t like people, they have other reasons for it apparently which we simply don’t care to know about. We all know that the only proper and just way to kill innocent civilians with the use of a bomb is to throw the bomb on the innocent civilian from a distance while wearing full army uniform. Anyone who does it any other way fails to attract our attention to his/her cause. And since he/she has cheated, now we will refuse to hear what the whole thing is about by sticking our fingers into our ears and shouting, ‘La la la la, I can’t hear you, lalalala’

As I walked back home last night, I saw something that I would never have believed if I had not seen it with my own two eyes. The old lady from 105 not only went and voluntarily gave her handbag to the bunch of teenagers hanging out by the Standing Discarded Refrigerator, but also gave each of the little rascals a big loving, grandmotherly hug and invited them over to her place for tea and biscuits.
Now that I think is a beautiful thing. Peace out.