At 4.56pm on a spring afternoon, countless women in the UK were being harassed on the street. It turns out I was one of them
I don’t know why I’m writing about this really, because nothing happened. Compared to what happens, nothing really happened. And in the five minutes it took to not happen – between 4.55pm and 5pm yesterday – he was never closer to me than three feet. What a respectful distance from which to be called a “dirty cunt”, my ha-di-ha-ha brain is saying. I was merely verbally aggressed by a stranger in a socially distanced way.
Plus it all feels a bit convenient for a columnist, right? And I agree – being followed and simultaneously screamed at by some guy I’d never clapped eyes on before yesterday afternoon was nothing if not convenient. Look, I’m writing a column about it today. But before this outbreak of convenience, this column honestly was going to be a fictional imagining of the royal family attending implicit bias training. I don’t want you to conclude I didn’t have other wares for this space if it hadn’t been for the convenient nothing that happened.
