Second opinion
I WAS driving home from the hospital one evening last week when an interesting sociological observation popped into my mind, unbidden as it were. Namely, that you can tell the kind of area you are in by the breeds of dog that people are out walking. When every hound is a bull terrier or a Rottweiler, you had better close your windows, apply the central locking and accelerate. Where Rottweilers are, can psychopaths be far behind?
Variety is the spice of life, of course, and we wouldn't want every dog to be a poodle or a miniature schnauzer. That is why, each day, I am thankful that we live in a tolerant, multiculti society; otherwise, I'd have to eat English food each day, and that would be a fate too horrible to contemplate.
Still, the tolerance sometimes frays a little round the edges. For example, only last week I was consulted by a woman who had taken refuge in the hospital by manufacturing a number of dramatic symptoms. She had resorted to this tactic because her next-door neighbour had spent the previous night screaming through the thin partition that the Housing Department calls a wall, `Yer f—ing Paki slag, why don't you an yer f—ing Paki bastards go back to India where you belong?'
It seems a little hard that two million people should have died during Partition only for a woman in a British slum to conflate the two countries half a century later, but let that pass. What was strange was that the alleged Paki slag was as white as you or I: in short, a true British slag, if a slag at all.
What was even odder was that this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, if one may be permitted to indulge in jokes about these matters, which is doubtful. For the neighbour who alluded to the Pakiness of her slagdom was herself the white mother of several children — alas, demography does not record the precise number — by Jamaican men. This fact naturally called forth the reciprocal reproach that she was a black bitch.
In the ensuing mêlée to defend the honour of their respective mothers, it emerged that Anglo-Paki bastards were no match for Afro-Saxon bastards, at least in the kingdom of the baseball bat. There was only one thing an Anglo-Paki slag could decently do in the circumstances: call in social services to look after her children and retreat to the nearest hospital.
As it happened, all her children had different fathers. She was an aficionado of young men of subcontinental origin, something of a specialist, in fact; but even her best friend could not call her a quick learner from experience. All the fathers of her children had promised her marriage, but all had abandoned her either just before or just after the birth of their child, when the cost of her concubinage threatened to escalate.
asked her why her neighbour should hate her so much. What had she done to deserve it?
She says I'm a grass, but I'm not. She's the grass. She's the one what calls the police when her black boyfriend hits her and then tells him it's me what called them. She's turned the whole street against me. Everyone thinks I'm a grass.'
And, as everyone knows, there's only one thing worse than a Paki slag, and that's a grass.
Theodore Dalrymple
Previous page
