Prejudices on the buses

Published: 18 February 2010

• DEAR, oh dear, Maggie Milner, what is your problem (Hellish hordes, Letters February 11)?    

I teach in a local secondary school and would happily bring a delegation of my charming, lively, talkative pupils to meet you. I am sure you would be impressed with their life-affirming enthusiasm.   

Yes, they talk loudly about everything (even on buses) and yes, they appear to eat everything in sight, but they are such fun! 

Perhaps we should each make a small donation towards a ticket for the distressed Ms Milner to see that play in the West End with Damian Lewis and Keira Knightley. Now, what is it called? Oh yes, The Misanthrope, Molière’s comedy about a man who hates other people, first performed in 1666. It seems miserable people have been around for centuries.

Alternatively, maybe we should open a book on who Ms Milner is gunning for next. My friend is putting money on hoodies. I’m betting on the toddlers...

Come on Maggie, cheer up.  It will be a sad day for all of us when kids stop being noisy and silly on buses. What were you like when you were a youngster? I seem to remember you saying that you were a Mick Jagger fan...
M LOBJOIS,
Bartholomew Road, NW5

Bad behaviour

• I USE the C11 bus two afternoons each week and am appalled by the behaviour of some of the pupils of the schools around Parliament Hill Fields. 

The girls are particularly badly behaved. They push their way onto the bus without consideration for other passengers, and they are rough and loud and use bad  language to each other and yell into their mobile phones.

I live near St Aloysius’s College in Highgate and I rarely see any boys from the school behaving badly and my impression is that discipline is strict in the school. The deputy head stands at the bus stop in the Archway Road at school breaking up time in the afternoon and marshals boys onto the buses in an orderly fashion. If parents have not taught their children how to behave unfortunately the role falls to the schools. 

Perhaps the schools around Parliament Hill Fields could provide monitors at the bus stops.
Name and address supplied, N6

Ignorant view

• READING Maggie Milner’s letter (February 11) made me both sad and angry. 

I take the “nightmare C11 bus” regularly to Archway, where I teach at Highgate school. 

It is true that it is often full with children from William Ellis, Parliament Hill and La Sainte Union schools. 

Far from being “hellish hordes”, I find the children polite, well-behaved and charming. It is too easy to rubbish the younger generation and not appreciate how they lack the prejudices against older people that we had (I am 60). Far from dreading taking the bus to Archway I look forward to it as a means of cheering me up in the mornings!

I was appalled by the language and patronising attitude of her letter. 

To describe our children’s behaviour as “savage” and their appearance as “fat and wobbly” is both disgusting and ignorant.
ANTHONY RICHARDS
Adamson Road, NW3