#50

I just say excuse me and then move through the gap. All this barging and muttering under your breath stuff is a bit weird

#51

I tried saying excuse me. Dozens of times. It didn’t work. Maybe one in 20 times.

1 Like
#52

saying excuse me is every bit as weird really, the situation is inherently weird because people should know how a two-way footpath works.

#54

Another vote for big_unit_ONTHEDECK.

3 Likes
#55

I would just like to add to this a lovely story about trying to cross a road when two total lads were blocking my way smoking weed or whatever.

I tried to get past them and they didn’t budge, then eventually they stopped dicking about and I managed to cross the road. I didn’t say thanks as I recall as they’d annoyed me in blocking up the path for so long, but I did smile at them instead.

They didn’t like the lack of thanks at all, and didn’t catch the smile so they then proceeded to follow me down Market Street shouting ‘bitch’ and telling me ‘I’m going to kick your baby in the head, you fucking bitch’ and sped up and followed me for a few minutes as I started to also speed up. This was on a really busy street, with a newborn baby, and no one stopped them from chasing me whilst threatening a baby, or asked me if I was ok. CHEERS MARKET STREET.

So the moral is, if you encounter some idiots on the street don’t expect them to realise they’re being idiots.

#56

That’s grim. Got to be honest, i find Manchester City Centre intimidating as fuck.

Last week there was a guy hugging one of those black pylon things outside Primark, off his nut on something, pants down, having a jobby. Middle of the day.

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#57

This is the sort of stuff that tends to happen right in the middle of one of my tours. I had a flasher follow us once but I managed to manoeuvre the group in such a way they never saw him.

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#58

3, except most of the time I’ve not got enough energy to walk slowly so I’m pacing it down the edge of the road #ReadingsSecondFastestPedestrian

#59

WATCH OUT defo works better than excuse me for dickheads who arent looking where theyre going. people who walk along looking at their phone are the worst, always want to shout THINK QUICK and go to bash it out of their hand. pretended to do this to @tilly the other week coz she didnt see me and she fair shat herself (sorry tilly :heart:)

3 Likes
#60

I’ll give that a go when I am next experiencing phone zombies. I arrive at work at 8am these days because fewer people are on the streets than later so there are by extension fewer idiots. Going home will be different.

#61

Central Manchester is pretty aggro in a lot of places. My dad goes on sometimes about how it’s really cleaned up its act these days and up until the late 90s it was a shithole, as if it’s not a shithole now.

#62

In secondary school, they gave all the prefects ‘prefect training’. One of the things taught was to not move out of people’s way in the corridor, especially younger students, so you’d command respect. I know it sounds silly, but it was actually Really Very Silly Indeed. There were about 400 kids across years 10 and 11, of which just under half were prefects (they invented stupid rules, like there had to be at least 2 on each school bus. State of it.) Obviously it just meant the corridor was a bunch of 15 year olds bashing into each other for the best part of 2 years.

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#63

GF barged clean through two groups of people walking three abreast on the footpath the other night. She takes absolutely no shit.

I usually just dance around them. I’m a fast walker and barging will slow me down.

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#64

oh wow

i’d guess that teachers are told to carry themselves with authority, and that’s part of it but… telling children to do that is a terrible idea!

#65

Teaching a small number of kids to be uppity and have an inflated sense of self importance seems like a highly banterous idea. Like something a teacher near retirement came up with because they just wanted to see some shit happen.

#66

That’s one of the worst thought through ideas I’ve heard

#67

Depends.

I like to feel a bit of …edge in a city centre, but there are just certain areas that are a bit too rowdy - Piccadilly Gardens and that end of Oldham Street particularly are just rough as fuck. If you go one block either side of Piccadilly Gardens - so to the Gay Village, Oxford Road, Deansgate, or the Northern Quarter it feels like a different city entirely.

We’ve said on here before, but what they’ve done to Picadilly Gardens is fucking criminal. It was quite literally one of the nicest city centres in the country and now it’s amongst the worst.

They could improve it immeasurably by not using it as a public transport hub, but instead diverting all the traffic to smaller bus stations, existing or new, around the centre, and, much more importantly, by offering some serious financial and operational help to local homeless charities.

3 Likes
#68

we used to copy the Bittersweet Symphony video in the halls in secondary school. got yelled at by a teacher for it, proper, proper yelled at.

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#69

Yeah it’s such a fucking scandal that the homelessness problem in Manchester isn’t being addressed. Anybody walking around the city centre can see that there’s pretty much a humanitarian crisis going on and it only ever seems to get worse.

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#70

Same in London. And probably most towns and cities. It’s an absolute disgrace. Why anyone votes for this government is beyond my understanding. They’ve created this situation and done nothing to fix it. They just don’t fucking care. As one Tory said a while back, ‘Homeless people are what we stop over when we come out of the opera.’