Getting the Horn.

I go for walks. I've been wandering around the arterial roads of East Belfast for nine years now. Its my only form of exercise and I am committed to it.  If I don't go for regular ambles my gammy right knee seizes up and I have to walk it off like cramp. I've put in hundreds of miles around Ballyhackamore and Dundonald and Tullycarnet, powdering the pavements on my endless journeys like a medieval penitent. There's the story of the Old Leatherman, a 19th Century chap who walked a huge clockwise circle between the Connecticut and Hudson rivers every 34 days for over thirty years, dressed from head to toe in a self-designed leather suit. Nobody knows why. He became a bit of a celebrity. Pearl Jam wrote a song about him. 

I'm more soberly dressed and thankfully Pearl Jam have never written a song about me or anyone I love, but I am out there on my pointless, endless circuit. And every time I am some bloke in a car or a van rolls his window down and bellows abuse at me. 

Every time. 

I'm not saying its the same man by the way. That would be worrying. But each time I'm out strolling - dressed provocatively as I was today in a black shirt and jeans - a man in a speeding car feels obliged to shout at me from his window. I wish my writing got as much attention. 

I don't think this happened in London. And I don't recall it happening Basingstoke, so is it just here? Is it a Northern Irish thing? "Look Jamie, a middle aged man in specs - you better wind the window down and yell some incoherent bollocks at him." "Good idea, Alan - strutting about on his hind-legs without so much as a dog to justify his presence. The fucking pervert."

I don't understand it. I'm soberly attired. There is nothing particularly outlandish about my appearance. So what is it? Have they seen one of the plays? Are they drive-by critics? "I didn't think much of that last Podcast!" "Zoomlanders is bollocks!"

I don't understand what they're attempting to communicate or what they're trying to achieve.  Or why I am the recipient of such consistent, long term braying. They can't tell I'm English by the way I use my walk, can they? 

As I was out walking today a blonde, female jogger ran towards me and a car driving in the opposite direction beeped its horn at her. I don't really understand this impulse either "Oh look there's an attractive woman. I shall make her aware of my interest by making a loud noise in my speeding vehicle. Who knows where it will lead?" 

But then I've never been a car owner. 

As our paths crossed and  I tried to give her a look of solidarity. I too have been the victim of unsolicited beeping. I feel your pain and your confusion. I tried to fold my face into a position that communicated all that. I probably looked like I was having a sudden bowel spasm. She flashed back a look of fierce hatred and I realised my false equivalency. She had no confusion. She's was not surprised. She was a woman who had gone out to take some exercise and it had proved too sexy for some random prick in a car. This had probably happened all her life and its just happened again and I was the first man she saw since it did. I was the face of the enemy and I was gurning like a madman at her. She pounded past, glowering. 

I went to the shop to buy soy sauce and check my privilege. I'm running low on soy sauce. Loads of privilege left though. Phew.