Saturday morning, 11-ish, and the overground station platform was heaving. A hi-vis Train Lady of about my age was holding up one of those ping-pong paddles (googled: 'dispatch batons', to let a driver know they can leave the station) and shouting 'MOVE BEHIND THE YELLOW LINE!' very loudly, several times. Despite the train being a few minutes away, everybody duly shuffled a few feet away from the edge of the platform, behind the yellow line.
Everybody except me. Was the next train coming in sideways?! Instead, I just walked past Train Lady on the wrong side of the yellow line - demonstrating my lifetime ability to put one foot in front of the other without falling on to a railway track - and said, 'Don't be so ridiculous!' Unsurprisingly, Train Lady looked both gobsmacked and flummoxed. In my defence, I regularly use this station at various times of the day, and I've never seen any other staff shouting pointlessly at travellers.
For my part, to have done something so mildly transgressive that it barely registered on the Richter scale of wrongness highlighted everybody else's extreme compliance in the face of quasi-authority... and that stirred something in me. It also took me back - way past the madness of Covid-era authoritarianism - to a place I recognised from childhood; a place where if I was ever told to do something I could not see the point of, by somebody whose reason for telling me to do it felt like overreach/adult bullying/ill-directed stupidity (or indeed any combo of the above), I just... wouldn't do it.
'I'd like to speak to the manager...'
Maybe now I'd be considered 'neurodiverse' in an excitingly 'special' way - though in the 1970s/80s it just meant I bunked-off school, got into arguments with a few teachers and didn't do well in exams. Eventually I grew up and got (marginally) better at concentrating on things I didn't really want to do and withholding unasked-for opinions.
Now, however, I am postmenopausal and the switch has flicked back again. I have become a cliché of I'd-like-to-speak-to-the-manager-please ‘Karen’-ness.
‘Karen’, in case you don’t know, is a slang term used to refer to a middle-class woman who is perceived as entitled or excessively demanding.
I am currently living my peak ‘Karen’ life, becoming increasingly ‘honest’ (aka blunt and unfiltered) with others. Here are a few of the things I (genuinely, promise) haven’t said to the following irritants...
- To Train Lady waving her ping-pong paddle around when there’s no train in sight: ‘I’m 61. Just like all these other perfectly sentient humans on this platform, I have also been on a train.’
- To the 20-something primary-school teaching assistant herding small children into all the available tube seats: ‘My knees are bad, so I’d like one of the kids’ seats, please - preferably before they start demanding safe spaces and a support rabbit.’
- To the nurse glued to her Insta-feed while a bed-bound patient’s call button beeps non-stop (as I have recently witnessed): ‘Hi! Just a reminder that it’s not 2020, so that old gent banging his bedpan isn’t giving you and the NHS a round of applause! How about getting off your ae and doing your job?’
- To the 20-ish young man not attempting to style himself as anything other than a young man while wearing a badge declaring his pronouns to be she/her, working in a busy customer-facing role (again, as recently witnessed): ‘I’ll have a pot of tea, a slice of that lovely-looking cake... and - random question here! - did your mother always let you have a seat on the tube?’
I have, as I say, often struggled with being told what to do/how to feel - never mind how I should address a 20-year-old male who wants to be a girl who looks like a boy. However, the unadulterated joy of getting a bit older/wiser is that while you become increasingly honest with others, so you can also be more honest with yourself. By acknowledging where/when you got some of life right and when you messed it up, royally, you are, indeed, fully empowered to boldly go where no ‘Karen’ has gone before.
To anyone who may disagree, I have a few words of advice: See it, Say it... Shut it!