Hoods

Finger continues to hover uncertainly over the 'delete standing order for TLS' option in my online bank account. The magazine has continued to disappoint. However, it did come up with something of interest, which I have now read, 'Among the Hoods' by one Harriet Sergeant.

Ms. Sergeant is a right wing think tank apparatchik who also writes for right wing newspapers, of an age to have at least one son of the same age as the hoodies with whom she was engaging.

The engagement appears to have been facilitated by a retired hoodie who can turn on considerable charm and both loves and models flashy clothes - but notwithstanding his retired status he dies in a very banal and unnecessary way in Jamaica about the time the book draws to a close. The engagement mainly takes the form of buying the hoodies - usually two or three from four or five core members of a gang - meals and taking them on outings. A few stray thoughts follow.

One of the hoodies has occasion to brush his teeth, whereupon his gums start to bleed big time. It seems that when in care it is one of one's human rights to be able to decline dental care which this hoodie did, with his mouth in a bit of a state in consequence. The sort of thing that my father used to see in the slums of Hartlepool during the depression years - an era one might have thought was not going to return.

One of the outings was to the Tate Rubbish, a place with reasonable numbers of groups of young ladies. So the hoodies start to swagger a bit and then edge over to one such group. Group thinks that they are terribly cool - but then suddenly realises that these people are not dressing up as hoodies, they really are hoodies. Exit group very fast. Odd how it is thought cool to emulate one of the lower forms of planetary life.

Life for hoodies seems very precarious. And for many of them very seedy, with foul accommodation and nothing like enough to eat. Many of them are more or less illiterate and more or less unemployable. Many of them have mental health problems. The odd bonus from crime appears to be rapidly dissipated on some form of conspicuous consumption or other - often clothes. They do seem to be obsessed with clothes.

But before one starts to feel too sorry for them, they are also without morals. They live on very short fuses. They mug and rob when they can, partly for the money and partly for the thrill. They appear to have no compunction or remorse about the amount of damage that they are doing. Knives and guns are part of their lives. This despite their odd flashes of considerable charm.

One admires the guts of Ms. Sergeant in mixing with these people, and taking them to places for which they have no manners and where they are apt to start shouting at the staff at the least provocation. On the other hand, by being with them in this sort of way, she is condoning, in some part at least, what they get up to. She and her tale are tainted. But, as she would no doubt say, how else do you get the story?

One of her points is that young men need lots of exercise and lots of activity, this is what good schools are good at and universities should carry on the good work. In the world of the hoodie there is none of this. Just a lot of frustrated and angry young men. As an aside, I remember once in the TB a chap explaining to me that it was alright for me because if I got angry I could verbalise my anger. He, the chap, could not do this beause he did not have the words. He could only bash people, which he recognised was not always a good way forward. I imagine many hoodies are in much the same position as my chap.

But she is very keen to rubbish the support systems that are in place and the people working in them. OK, so they are not working too good, but what does she suggest? Her own efforts did not bear much fruit with of the four hoodies with whom she was most concerned one would up a successful criminal, one in a mental hospital, one in prison and the last one dead. And she appears to have given them a fair amount of quality time. Her rubbishing rather smells of a knee jerk right wing reaction; anything provided by the state is bound to be rubbish. Why not let my mates in Corporation X make some money out of it instead? That said, there does appear to be a fair amount of room for improvement.

All in all, rather depressing. But I do have some wheezes. My first would be to try and get more good people working at ground level: it all reminds me a bit of the mental health world where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth but precious few quality people prepared to get down to the grunt work. I guess the answer is to throw some money at it. And my second would be to build lots of higher grade hostels in the affected inner city areas, something much more like student hostels of the 1970's than the rather grubby hostels-in-the-community we have now. Hostels big enough to run to sports & such like, a proper canteen, rudimentary health care and other support services. All in all, something of a return to the asylum concept we binned in the closing decades of the 20th century.

The other angle is, of course, to legalise and then regulate drugs.