I was forced to travel on public transport recently because my car was in for a service. Little did I know that my journey would soon become the bus ride from hell! As I sat on my slightly soiled seat I could feel the squalor of the working classes assaulting my senses on all fronts, but I stared manfully out of the window and tried hard to blot it out. Oh how I longed for a heavily pregnant woman to board the bus so that I could offer her my seat and then stand smugly for the rest of the journey, but no such luck.
As I flicked through your excellent headline article about the continuing mystery surrounding Princess Diana's suspicious death, my ears were suddenly assaulted by the tinny drone of what passes for music these days. It was most off-putting, and I found myself looking over to see which teenage asbo whore might be responsible for this cacophony. Imagine my surprise to see instead a pigtailed blond girl, no more than ten years old, clutching an offensive pink mobile phone from which some cheap digital tune was now blaring. And there beside her sat her disinterested mother, blissfully unaware of the aural damage her daughter was wreaking.
I was not just disgusted, I was appalled. This miserable child was unable to survive a short bus journey without the need for anti-social entertainment. My fellow passengers and I were being forced to endure some blaring R&B nonsense so that this poor little moppet didn't get bored during her ten minute bus journey. Worse still, this council estate urchin had clearly been brought up to have total disregard for her elders and betters by a thoughtless mother. I wanted to beat some sense into this woman's tiny head with my rolled up copy of the Daily Express. I'll give her good manners, traditional values and good clean fun. Somehow I resisted.
This is not the Britain my grandparents fought for. This is a nightmare society where discourtesy and insolence are commonplace. What our young people need is a bit of respect drummed into them, and fast. So I'd like to suggest the return of the death penalty for people who play music out loud on public transport. It's the very least they deserve. And life imprisonment for anyone who has the volume on their headphones up so loud that the person sitting next to them can hear it. That'd show 'em.
What we need is a gibbet on every bus and a gallows on every train. Let's stand up for law and order and good old fashioned morality. I'm not afraid to say what I think. I'm crusading for a better Britain. That's why I read the Daily Express.
Yours enraged, Mr Silent Majority (retd)
P.S. And let's bring back flogging for children who forget to say please and thank you, and teenagers who drop litter in the streets, and company managers who relocate their call centres to India, and neighbours whose bonfire smoke blows across your washing line, and people who let their dogs foul the footpath, and illegal asylum seekers, and gum chewers, and freeloaders, and shop assistants who look at you in a funny way, and...
