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CHAVS OR MINK, EACH IS AS BAD AS THE OTHER

Friday, May 16, 2008
LETTERS
From Pete Harris, 13 West Priory Cottages, Eddington Road, Seaview:
THEY say money can’t buy you love. Let me tell you from my own recent experience it plainly doesn’t buy manners or concern for others, either.
On Saturday night last, I stayed with my family at a famous Seaview hostelry. On the same evening, Seaview Yacht Club held a social event for its usual clientele — in the main, the holiday home fraternity with an interest in boats.
At around 2am, the event ended and revellers began to make their way home. Without exaggerating, I’d say that for an hour or so, groups of them passed along the street in small parties.
How do I know that? Because they were shouting at the tops of their voices, without let-up. They were not speaking in hushed tones, aware of folk sleeping. They were bellowing at each other, while not giving a damn for anyone but themselves.
One individual in particular seemed to have had with her quite a following. It was Amanda this, Amanda that, at maximum volume.
So did Amanda ask her fan club to pipe down and show a little respect? Not a bit of it. She bellowed back as loudly as the males desperate to impress her with their wit.
One of my fellow guests at the hostelry, a woman, asked them to please be quiet. The offensive answer was shrieked from the street by a male with a plum in his mouth.
I’m struck forcibly that those whose conduct I’m describing here are exactly the sorts of people who’ll whinge about benefits-fuelled chavs and the way in which those sorts blight society.
I’d agree about the chavs but I can’t see this well-heeled bunch is really any different.
If chavs radiating ‘attitude’ rate as the flea-bitten rats of our disintegrating society, then the rabble I’m questioning here rate perhaps as mink?
To my mind, the conduct and attitudes radiating from these people epitomise what’s become of our fragmenting society. ‘I’ll do what I like and stuff everybody else’ sums up the mindset.
They do the yachting fraternity no favours. And they set a diabolical example.
Be they rat or mink on the outside, it seems to me each is as bad as the other. Both blight the lives of decent people.
In an ideal world, both need eradicating. Not literally, of course, but through a fundamental change to their personal attitudes.