Men of garlic

Mrs O and I spent the weekend in France - Montpellier, to be exact.  It's a city we'd never visited before.  And I can pronounce myself happy with it.  Like all truly interesting cities, it has its architectural moments (cathedrals, a university etc.) but it's also a little grubby and unkempt in parts.  Never threatening, just a little grungy.

It's unsurprising, this shabby side, when you realise that a quarter of the city's populace is made up of students.  It's a big place too, so that's plenty of students.  I've never been in a place that is so student-heavy.  A demographic like this is wont to attract shit-kickers, and this Montpellier does with gusto.  They're everywhere, but their biggest concentration is to be found outside the big Monoprix supermarket on the main square.  Again, they're not threatening (the French police would never tolerate that), but they do drag the otherwise Belle Époque vibe of the place down a notch or several hundred.

I do get annoyed by white (and they are always white) dreadlocked dropouts like this.  You just know that they're all the over-indulged offspring of relatively well-to-do bourgeois families, and could lift themselves free of the mire in a heartbeat if required.  They're playing with bohemianism, which annoys me.

What annoys me more, however, is the fact most of them try to dress up their lifestyles as some kind of mordant comment or satire on "the system" and its corrupt mores.  The truth of matter is rather more prosaic: they're drunks.  That's all.  No more and no less.  

I do feel for yer actual tramps when I see wimps like this toying with the lifestyle.  At least real tramps recognise their place in the hierarchy of developed industrial society: they're the ones rolling around at the bottom of it, boss-eyed with drink and, frankly, loving it.  They make no claims to a greater insight than the rest of us, or to living lives of greater veracity.  They simply have to live that way.

Nor do they pretend that substance abuse is the golden highway to self-knowledge.  They just like being pissed-up more than they don't.  That's why a steaming-drunk tramp will always repeat some variation of the same tramps' manta to you when you happen across his path.  He will want you to know in no uncertain terms just how "fooking pisht" he is.  End of message.  If you want to read more into it than was intended, that's your look-out.  Mr Tramp simply called the material situation as he saw it at the time.  Real tramps are suspicious of schools of abstract thought.  That's partly why they end-up being tramps of course.  It's difficult to concentrate on passing exams and insuring your home when your belief in the intrinsic value of society has been undermined by cider.