HAT IN THE RIVER

It’s been a very hot day today. And also, unusually at the same time, a bank holiday.

I thought it might be nice to cook a little pasta meal and eat it in the sunset in the park. I like it when the deep shadows fall across the long grass, when the lowering sun turns the leaves golden and the heat fades as the birds sing goodnight.

What I’ve ended up with is: 

sharing the sunset, the silence, and the beauty of the end of the baking day... with two guys booming loud, homophobic, profanity-laced rap across the valley. It seems too, that the best way for them to cope with this ridiculous music, is to surround themselves in clouds of green-looking smoke.

There are kids in this park.

What’s the point of this stuff? These two jokers are cycling through tracks which sound pretty much identical. Samples repeat over heavy, thudding beats and headache-inducing sirens and beeps. Then a voice that sounds like it wants to beat you up, riffs over the top of all of that, about crack, blacked-out windows and all manner of other things that don’t belong in a suburban park.

They’ve angled the speaker towards me. What a treat.

I won’t be intimidated though, not even by this antisocial irresponsibility. But what is the right thing to do? I imagined phoning the police for a moment. A quick calculation of outcomes though and I decided against it.

What would happen, I wonder (and I’m obviously not going to do it) if I brought out my own Bluetooth speakers and boomed out some Beethoven, or some Verdi from just a couple of park benches along.

Two wrongs rarely make it right. And teenagers aren’t typically brilliant at working out a point about the nature of responsibility, however subtly it is made.

All I can do, I think, is sit it out for a while. It won’t stay this warm, this light, this pleasant.

However, I’m not going to win this battle of wits. Some foul-mouthed girls have just turned up with chinking plastic bags, and the boys are settling into an age-old pattern of escalating bravado. Up goes the music. Soon they’ll light a fire and be out here with the Moon.

I put too much chilli in my pasta-conglomerate. Veggie mince, tomatoes, red and yellow peppers, a spoonful of marmite, a handful of cheese, and too much chilli powder.

The boys have turned the music down so that they can talk to the girls without shouting over it. Romance saves me again. Although, this a very loose sort of romance indeed, and mostly, the girls are trying to impress the boys by bragging about how much they drink. 

My mind is lost in 1995 for a while. A sunny evening by the river, trying hard to work out the dynamics of the circle of friends, spread across the grass and talking in a way they never usually talk. Was there booming music? Eminem? The Fugees? I can’t remember. Clinking bags of bottles and cans? Probably. All I really remember is that a girl threw my Reebok hat into the Thames, and I went home, thinking about the choices I would need to make. Purity or friends, compromise or... loneliness.

But everything is so short-sighted when you’re seventeen. There is no way to imagine, to see, to forecast what the world is like, or why a temporary choice looks painful, but is ultimately the wisest thing to do. Worst of all, the people who know what you don’t, and even things you don’t yet know that you don’t know, are exactly the kind of sad-looking figures who sit a couple of park benches away, looking whimsically at the trees, and eating spicy pasta.

Turn up the volume. Angle the speaker. Be angry and hard and cool if you like. Maybe the grown-ups will get the message and leave you in peace.