Hi All,
I would like to relate to you an experience that I had a couple of weeks back. Given that this is a family forum I will do my best to censor the language, but please forgive me if anyone finds this offensive.

My wife and I attended a concert in the centre of Sydney and had drinks and nibbles with a couple we hadn’t seen for a few years. It was a great concert (Paul Kelly, one of Australia’s finest, IMHO) and we had a lovely time catching up with our friends. I was wearing my Cornish National tank with black Dr Martens, white T-shirt & black leather jacket – nothing but positive comments all evening, that is until we were on our way home.

While waiting to cross the road to the train station, I heard an extremely aggressive voice snarl the words, “William Wallace was a skirt-wearing f*****!” It was clear to me that this was not somebody ‘paying me out’ – this was somebody in an extremely agitated state.

I turned around to see five young guys of, to use TV newspeak “Middle Eastern appearance” walking towards me: the smallest of them being the one who had made the comment. The other four didn’t say a word, they just grabbed their aggro little and tried to get him to keep walking. He broke away from them and started approaching me again so I (in retrospect, perhaps unwisely) put my hands on my hips and said to him, with a smile, “Little boy, when you get home you can tell your mother that you saw a real man tonight.” I then winked at him and said, “She’ll know who you’re talking about.”

Not surprisingly, this made him even more agitated, but he wasn’t game to come any closer than about five metres. His mates were nowhere to be seen, apart from one who came back to grab him and hold up his hand as if to placate me and stop his little pal from getting thumped. (I might add that I was having a great night and had no intention of thumping anybody, but would certainly have defended myself from a physical attack if necessary.)

The best my little ‘friend’ could come up with was to (rather predictably), grab his crutch and spit the immortal words, “Oh, yeah! Well your mother’s had my big Middle Eastern **** in her ****!” Now, a comment like that is likely to make the blood of a teenage boy boil, but being almost 40, and realising I was engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed ‘man’, I simply laughed at him and said (and I mean must stress here that this is the first time in my life that I have ever stooped to making a comment that could be regarded as racist ) words to the effect that I now new for sure that he was full of BS, because there is no such thing as a “big Middle Eastern ****”, apart from the one on his shoulders.

As his friend dragged him off (and I must add that he wasn’t really making much of an effort to break free and attack me) all he could do was remind me that just as William Wallace was a skirt-wearing f*****, so was I. By this time, the other pedestrians waiting to cross the road realised there was not going to be an act of violence committed, and began to laugh at my would-be attacker, and congratulate me on standing up to a thug.

My wife chastised me gently for not simply ignoring the initial comment – which would have been the best course of action I suppose – but couldn’t help laughing about the fact that the little bloke had become even more aggressive than when he started, and obviously wouldn’t be able to count on his mates backing him up if he picked the wrong guy next time.

Stay safe,

Troy