Dangerous rucksacks
Roger Lewis
Once the warm weather commences, huge numbers of very loud, spotty French (mainly, but also Italian) schoolchildren crowd the English pavements.
Ostensibly traipsing to our cathedral cities on educational tours, they chiefly jostle each other, throw bottles of water about and turn clumsy cartwheels. The boys (newly broken voices, faint moustaches) show off in front of the girls; the girls are either Latin Lolitas or their less demure, fat and lumpy companions.
Any teacher or supervisor is nowhere to be seen, as they are normally doing a bunk-up with the bus driver in the Morrisons car park.
In any event, why should any of these youngsters be interested or even theoretically interested in Rochester’s Dickens remnants or Hastings’s 1066 statuary? The sights must mean very little. Waves of irritated boredom emanate from these school groups, who are perhaps travelling abroad for the first time without parents.
I was in London recently, and there they were again, these noisy Continental students, creating huge queues at the British Museum, Tate Britain and the South Bank. Anywhere I wanted to go, they’d beaten me to it.
It’s worse than that, actually. More often than not, the school groups are led off to a designated entrance gate, quite circumventing the public queues and security cordons. I saw heaps of them being let into the Munch exhibition at the British Museum. When I finally made it to the door, I was denied any entry and told that it was a special ‘young people and families’ morning, and that I’d have to return three hours later. My face by now resembled the famous Munch scream.
And all of these privileged children wield rucksacks/backpacks/haversacks. When the youngsters turn around sharply, pensioners are sent sprawling into the gutter. The hiking gear is an absolute menace on escalators and on the Tube train platforms. I am always at risk of death, being hit in the face with sharp buckles and zips.
I remember when rucksacks first came in, and knew they were bad news. I was teaching at Oxford in the Eighties, and undergraduates would arrive for a tutorial on Robert Browning. They’d be kitted out in hiking boots and woolly hats, as if for a bracing trek across the Black Mountains. They’d only come from as far as Headington.
Raymond Briggs is away