I was up at Westfield in Stratford yesterday. I go there fairly regularly as it’s a good place to head to whenever I want to get out of my flat but don’t want to freeze my arse off. If you’ve never been there, Westfield is a huge, lavish shopping centre on three levels next to the Olympic Park: it’s like the Trafford Centre but probably even bigger. Thousands of people must go there every day. The thing is, yesterday afternoon I was having trouble with my powerchair again. It had conked out, and I had been pushed to customer services.

Long story short, in the end I needed to get a taxi home. While sat near the customer services desk though, I overheard the staff talking about quite a large and growing problem: more and more kids are now thundering around the mall on rollerblades, deliberately ignoring the rules. They are becoming more and more arrogant, blatantly ignoring anyone who tells them to stop as if they think the rules don’t apply to them, or that they are too cool to be told what to do. Apparently, many now come to the mall in normal footwear and then change into their rollerblades, as though they have come specifically to break the rules. Whenever they are confronted or told to stop, they snidely ignore the request.

The thing is, more and more people are being hurt by these little shits. They zoom around banging into whoever can’t get out of the way fast enough, not giving a damn about who they hurt. I have narrowly avoided crashing into one two or three times. The issue is growing so severe that one lady called them a pest, and I think that’s quite apt. This is obviously a craze among young people where they think they display how cool and anti-establishment they are: they break the rules, but put other people in considerable danger.

To be honest, that kind of arrogance really pisses me off. It’s a kind of “We do what we want and are too cool to be told not to” attitude which now seems to be endemic in young people. It could have come about through the alienating effect of social media or whatever, but regardless last night I decided to do something about it.

Sat there last night waiting for my taxi, I began to wonder if these kids would be so jaunty if a cripple in a powerchair crashed into them. And with that I chuckled.