In the mind-boggling case of the man killed by a punch in a fracas over a supermarket queue, a woman has been arrested following the detention earlier this week of a Tony Virasami, her partner. Antoinette Richardson is also to be charged with murder.
It would seem that Richardson called Virasami (as you would a highly trained but mindless rottweiler) to come and take action after somebody pushed ahead of her at the tills. The victim, Kevin Tripp, was not even the culprit – he was just the first person that this thug encountered. A mild-mannered and popular family man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Now it is true that supermarkets are frustrating places: slow-moving trolleys, unruly children, slow-moving check-outs, incomprehensible special offers which only serve to complicate your life, slow-moving shop-staff. But most of us just grimace and bear it. Or we alter our shopping habits to go at a less frustrating time. Or we abandon supermarkets and rediscover our corner shops instead.
This rage thing has got to stop. Only last weekend we were lamenting a new spate of bakery rage: where is it all leading?
Mike Fisher, of the British Anger Management Society, reckons rage is a mechanism to deal with pain. But as the Times’ Tim Rayment
points out:
Pain? What have we got to be pained about? This is the fourth leading economy on Earth. We can downsize, job-share, and leave a failing marriage at will. It takes pocket money to join what used to be “the jet set”; we can buy a BMW for £199 a month, drink and gamble to our heart’s content, and watch football on 70in plasmas. We have legal safeguards against everything, and the infectious diseases that gave Victorian graveyards their youthful corpses have gone.
…we’ve never had it so good.
Londonist doesn’t know the answer, but we do know that it makes us very sad. Rage is something that the elements do. Londoners ought to know better.
Passive Sainsburys queue from daveknapik’s flickr stream under the Creative Commons Licence.
