If you go down to the woods today…
29 Apr
So, today I have narrowly escaped assault, been chased out of the local woodland by a crazed teenager carrying a big stick,and am now waiting to be interviewed by the police. Hi, how is your Sunday going?
It was partly my fault. I mean, I was out walking Rubin, and I know the ghetto estate behind our own green and leafy suburb is a no-go area on the weekends and out of school hours (well, anytime really, but particularly when there are likely to be gangs of restless teenagers wandering around with their tracksuits and their Buckfast), but on this pleasant and sunny Sunday afternoon I was all “how bad can it possibly be?”
People, it can be BAD.
Most of the walk was pretty uneventful. As we entered the home stretch though, and begun our approach to the Ghetto Superstore (situated next to the Ghetto Post Office, Ghetto Chinese Takeaway and Ghetto Chip Shop) I saw a whole gang of spotty adolescents hanging around outside (because standing outside the Ghetto Superstore is, like, SO the coolest thing you could ever hope to do with your life. GOD, I can’t wait until I’m cool enough to do that!), most of them dressed up as footballers and with lots of cheap gold jewellery rattling against their cans of lager. Yup, it’s Stereotypes-R-Us down the ghetto, I’ll tell you!
Seeing this blot on humanity appear on the horizon I stopped in my tracks. Given that my red hair and fluffy white Bichon Frise make me the natural target of the under-educated, I knew it would be sheer folly to try and walk past them, especially when they’d had all morning (when they should have been at church!) to get hyped up on Buckfast. So I turned right and plunged into the narrow strip of woods that buffers our estate from The Ghetto instead. This was not quite as crazy as it might sound: the woodland is actually quite pleasant – lots of squirrels have made their homes in the manky old sofas and burnt out prams – and it was created for the very purpose I was using it: giving the dog walkers and ramblers of the world somewhere far (well, actually quite close, but you know what I mean) from the smell of the Ghetto Chip shop to pass the time.
Today? Today it was not quite so pleasant. No, today, almost as soon as I got under the shade of the trees, I found myself accosted by a teenager with a BIG STICK. Seriously, it was huge – I actually think it was the branch of a large tree, and he was brandishing it like a baseball bat. “GIT OOTY MA WOOD!” (Translation: “Would you be so kind as to remove yourself from this woodland, please?”) he shouted, coming towards me menacingly. “IT’S MA WOOD! GIT OOT! OOOOT!” This, needless to say, was accompanied by much waving of the branch, threateningly. It was really quite thrilling.
What did I do? The wrong thing, obviously. Well look, I may have been being threatened in the middle of a wood, with no one around to hear me if I screamed (thus answering the age old “If an Amber screams in a wood and there’s only a mad Chav around to hear, does she make a noise?” question. Yes, she does make a noise, but then the chav kills her, the end.), but I was still me. I weighed up the options: me, 5’3″, scared, got a dog with me but it’s the Rubinman, who, to be honest, isn’t much use in a fight. My Opponent: about the same height, not scared, carrying a branch the size of my entire body, crazy, possibly drunk… It was no contest, really. I decided to run away, but first I decided to be characteristically stupid and yell at him to LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE OR I WILL CALL THE POLICE AND THEY WILL TOTALLY RESCUE ME, OK? Then I looked around to see if Superman was on his way to save me, but Superman must’ve been busy, so I turned and ran home like a girl.
Of course, my ill-advised bit of bravado had served only to enrage my assailant further. “GNNAAAARRRRR!” he roared, raising his branch above his head and running towards me full pelt. But I had started running away by then and, I dunno, maybe he realised he would never catch me or something? (I mean, I don’t like to boast, but I was on my primary school’s running team, you know, and this one time the gym teacher told me I had “an athlete’s action”. I was 10 and have never been praised for my “action” since, but I have never forgotten that brief moment of glory). Anyway, he stopped following me and walked back to his friend (YES! THERE WERE TWO OF THEM! But the friend didn’t actually do anything, so he doesn’t really count), but not before shouting to me that I was “LUCKY”. Yes, lucky.
Anyway, I made my trembling way back to the house and told my tale of woe to Terry, who told me to phone the police, because seriously, what has the world come to when a woman can’t walk her dog behind her house without being threatened by hooligans with branches, WHAT HAS IT COME TO PEOPLE? I wasn’t sure whether phoning the police would be an over-reaction, but because there’s been a lot of trouble in the ghetto lately, and because I am all about the drama, I did it anyway. “Why, an elderly person or small child could walk through those woods and be killed, just like I almost was!” I thought. “And also: how very dare they threaten me and my dog?”
So, I called the police, who, despite sounding not at all interested in what I was saying, told me they’d “send someone round”. Well, I’ve been waiting all afternoon, but no police. Maybe they’re too busy out chasing real criminals, or maybe they just don’t care that I could have died. Either way, no more ghetto walks for me, I think. Sorry, Rubin…
The police are too busy patrolling the motorways looking for people doing 71mph. (Put on fake old woman’s voice) There’s no enough bobbies on the beat nowadays.
Glad you didn’t die though that would have sucked real bad!
Geeez. That’s awful. I didn’t actually think where you stayed was *that* bad. Am hastily revising my opinion. Roll on that lottery win, huh?
Oh, where we *live* isn’t actually that bad – well, other than the badly behaved kids who keep knocking my fence down – it’s where I walk the dog that’s not so nice. Looks like Rubin and I will be looking for a new place to walk!
So sorry about your experience, but glad you are ok! Damn police.
Fuuuuuuck!
God I’m really glad you’re ok! And to think I was getting p’d off that some chavvy girl on the beach insinuated I was gay (by the way, quite impressive subtlety for a chav I might add, I didn’t know they had the brains)
Rubinman should have taken care of him, being part wolf like he is.
Maybe you should brush up on your Word Definitions: Ghetto
1. ghetto – formerly the restricted quarter of many European cities in which Jews were required to live; “the Warsaw ghetto”
quarter – a district of a city having some distinguishing character; “the Latin Quarter”
2. ghetto – any segregated mode of living or working that results from bias or stereotyping; “the relative security of the gay ghetto”; “no escape from the ghetto of the typing pool”
3. ghetto – a poor densely populated city district occupied by a minority ethnic group linked together by economic hardship and social restrictions
“The urban ghetto, constructed during the first half of the twentieth century and successively reinforced thereafter, represents the key institutional arrangement ensuring the continued subordination of blacks in the United States.” (18)
“For urban blacks, the ghetto has been the paradigmatic residential configuration for at least eighty years.”
“The term “ghetto” is most commonly applied to racially restricted housing patterns. It is meant to have broader connotations in this essay; as an impressionistic and interpretive phrase which meaningfully summarizes the social, economic and psychological positions of black people in the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also symbolizes the ton e of urban race relations in those years.”
Need i go on???
Ghetto Neighbour-and maybe *you* should brush up on you popular colloquialisms?
Words change, meanings change. Language is transient.Your post just goes to prove the myriad definitions-that have evolved over the course of decades- for one word. A bit of an own goal, no?
And, no, you needn’t go on. Thanks all the same, but I think we’ve got the picture.
Jen (BA (Hons) Lingusitics)