Characters should be celebrated for their eccentric ways

I’VE been known before to talk about my love of characters. Be they a harmless eccentric, the kind of which we all know and (most of the time) love, to the sort you might watch on the TV, there’s a very welcome space for all of them in our society, in my opinion.

For example most recently, in Derby, a decent number of us will have seen the man who rides his mobility scooter through the city centre music blaring, like he’s some kind of four-wheeled DJ.

Similarly, countless people will be aware of the guy who walks backwards, with many knowing a number of rumours and supposed reasons for him doing so.

These people neither hurt nor offend anyone, and their very existence should be enriching rather than a nuisance in our lives.

In the area where I live we have a young man who hangs around the local bus stops not causing a nuisance, but instead simply taking photographs of the vehicles when they pass.

Quite what his motivation for this is I don’t know, and I’ve never asked him, but the people who see him let him happily go about his daily life doing so as he is not hurting or offending anyone.

I think one of the local cafes even provides him with a cup of tea and glass of water free of charge as the lad stands there for hours at a time.

Three decades or more ago, when I was an undergraduate in Bristol, there was a woman who would walk quickly up one of the main roads out of the city centre to the area where I lived. If anyone tried to overtake her on the pavement, she would jog on a few paces, never letting anybody get past her.

Rather cruelly, I thought, some of the local kids would sometimes treat her as a figure of fun and deliberately sprint past her to see what her reaction would be, laughing as she attempted to get in front of them.

Ultimately, with the benefit of hindsight, some of these people clearly have or had their own mental health issues that lead or led them to behave in the way they do or did.

But each of them is also a human being deserving of our respect and attention.

Like those who would attempt to overtake the lady on the pavement in Bristol, I have seen (mainly but not always) youngsters pointing and laughing at some of the eccentrics in Derby and in Nottingham, where I live. I put this down to naivety rather than a deliberate attempt to be cruel.

Gang mentality and confidence in numbers can make people behave in this way, I feel.

Clearly, in my day job in the courts, I see my fair share of colourful characters and it might be argued that these, perhaps, deserve a little less respect than the people I talk about above?

Where some of these are different, however, is that they are very often lawbreakers, and in some cases dangerous. But at the same time each of them can be something of a character in their own right.

I recall a few years ago one defendant was up for sentence on a Friday afternoon at Derby Crown Court for, I think, a relatively minor fraud. Perhaps fearing his fate, he chose to rather unwisely spend the morning drinking heavily in The White Horse directly opposite the court house in The Morledge. The judge, getting wind of this, refused to sentence what I recall was quite an imposing hulk of a man swaying from side-to-side and slurring his words in the dock.

As they told him his case was being adjourned to a future date, when he might be a little more sober, the defendant burst into tears and told the bewigged judge: “I need help.”

So let us celebrate the characters of this world and not try and vilify them, because if we do the latter, one day they might be gone.

Some of these people clearly have mental health issues... but each of them is also a human being deserving of our respect.