Tony Parsons: Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

One thing is certain: reasoning with them does not work. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time – they don’t have one. If, when yobs swear, you tell them to turn down the volume, you’d better be prepared to go all the way.

Because they will be.

Context is everything. I don’t advocate going around telling every foul-mouthed moron to shut his filthy cakehole. It does not bother me at all if I am at a football match and the bloke in the seat behind me is shouting about ‘stupid cunts’. The stupid cunts at football matches don’t bother me. I don’t much care what anyone says if I am alone. But if I am out with my family and it happens – in a restaurant, in a park, in a hotel bar-then that’s different.

Nothing will get me to keep my mouth shut. And it is nothing to do with bravery. I just can’t accept foul-mouthed strangers entering my daughter’s world. And I am very happy to kick, gouge and claw while rolling in the dirt to make my point.

Stupid, really. I am not much good to my daughter if some psycho–chav buries his blade in my heart. And what a waste – to lose your life because you asked some pathetic piece of pond scum-and his mates, because they are invariably mob-hande – to watch his potty mouth.

But there is nothing rational about the flight-or-fight mechanism. It is not a debating society. It is not as though you carefully weigh the options and then go with one or the other. The moment you make your decision is here and gone before you know it.

And suddenly you are either bowing your craven head because safety is the wisest course of action, or you are confronting a group of leering teenagers-because sometimes the stupid thing is also the right thing.

And then you ask yourself: Can I take them? These leering strangers – will they put me in the A&E or the graveyard?

Almost certainly, all things considered, you can’t take them. They are younger than you, stronger than you, and you are the one who is flying solo. They are what the media call multiple assailants.

But what gets you through is that – if you are mad enough to say something in the first place-you are inevitably a lot angrier than they are.

You come out of nowhere, seething with rage, right in their faces – they haven’t been trying to offend your small child. You’re ready to rumble, full of that righteous, blood-pumping juice where you just don’t care what happens to you. And that might just be enough to make them back down and go away, despite their superior numbers.

If they don’t kill you, that is.

They killed young Kevin Johnson. He was twenty-two years old, at home in Sunderland with his seven-month-old baby son Chase trying to sleep in his cot. It was the early hours of the morning. And down on the street, right outside Kevin’s front door, a gang of lads was getting very loud. Kevin could have put the pillow over his head. He could have tried to soothe his son. He could have done nothing. That would have been the easiest thing to do. But Kevin went out into the street and told the gang-there were three of them-to keep the noise down. And they stabbed him to death. And Chase Johnson will grow up without a father because Kevin refused to take the soft, sensible option. Because Kevin Johnson was decent. Because Kevin Johnson was brave. Because Kevin Johnson wanted to protect his family. No doubt Chase will be proud of his father one day. And so he should be. Even if he will never remember him.

Entitlement – that’s the great curse of our age. Every scabby little yob thinks he has the right to do whatever he wants at whatever volume he wants. Nobody has any responsibility to the wider community. And that’s what it comes down to when you tell some foul-mouthed gang to cut it out. You are saying: I’m here too, I have rights too. A crazy thing to say in this day and age.

In Brokeback Mountain , Heath Ledger’s character Ennis is at a Fourth of July party with his wife and two small daughters when a couple of bikers start making a loud comparative study of ‘pussy’ in Montana and Wyoming.

‘Let’s move, Ennis, let’s just move,’ says his wife, Alma. But Ennis is a man not a mouse and he quietly and politely asks the two drunken bikers to ‘Keep it down – I got two little girls here.’

They don’t just ignore him. They start loudly speculating about the last time Ennis had sex with his missus. They provoke him. They goad him. They are unrepentant in their obscenities. They can’t get past the pussy. It’s pussy, pussy, pussy with these guys. And they tell him to listen to his wife: if he doesn’t like it, then go sit somewhere else.

Ennis goes wild. He kicks the first biker full in the face, knocking him out cold, and offers to put the other one’s teeth in his digestive system. The conscious biker backs away, dragging his bloodied pal with him.

And what makes the scene a work of genius is that Ennis’ wife and children are not grateful. Far from it.

They are all appalled at the violence that lurks inside this soft-spoken husband and devoted father. As several families pick up their blankets and move away – as if it is Ennis who poses a threat to civilisation, rather than the bikers – his children whimper and hide and his wife stares at him as if seeing him for the first time.

In my experience, that’s just what it is like.

When yobs swear, it is very easy to end up looking like the bad guy. It is very easy to find your wife and child staring at you as if they have suddenly realised that you are, in fact, a gay cowboy.

This is how it was. We were in a restaurant. At the next table were three teenage lads. They were probably not so different to me and my mates at that age – although I don’t recall sitting around in family restaurants in my teens. And they were discussing the sister of one of the lads. ‘A right little slag’, apparently. ‘She was ready to give him a jump!’ This was said while gesturing at one of the group – presumably not her brother, though you never know.

I listened to this stuff for, oh, about four minutes, or possibly six, as my wife pretended to study the menu and our small daughter crayoned in her My Little Pony workbook.

Then I told them to shut the fuck up.

And I told them that I was only going to give them one fucking warning. And – red-faced with rage, ludicrously holding a knife and fork in my hand, as though I might eat them alive – I pointed at my daughter and said that she wasn’t going to listen to this fucking stuff about how your fucking sister was ready to fuck anybody, for fuck’s sake.

They were scared. They shut up and ate their happy meals as quiet as mice. And I know they could have beaten the living shit out of me with absolutely no problem. I would have had no chance whatsoever against multiple assailants of their age and size. But here’s the thing: it mattered more to me than it did to them. And I really meant it. If they had told me to go fuck myself, I would have happily kicked them through the buffet bar. Or attempted to.

As soon as I told them to shut up, they were not the problem. The problem was my wife. She pointed out – later, when we were alone, when that miserable meal was over – that our daughter had been so busy colouring in the My Little Pony characters that she had not heard a word they had said about the slutty sister. But – so my wife insisted – our daughter had heard every profanity spat out by her psychotic father.

When yobs swear, you sort of hope that your family will love you more if you make a stand. You hope they will be grateful that you are the kind of man who does not just turn his butt cheeks and say, Go ahead, world, fuck me up the arse.

You think they might even be proud of you.

Not a bit of it. Like Alma, the wife in Brokeback Mountain , my own wife was horrified by the level of rage I had to summon up before I could say anything. My wife was as appalled as Heath Ledger’s missus in Brokeback Mountain. And I am not even having a secret affair with Jake Gyllenhaal.