Flasher at large

After a chore-packed morning I logged onto Twitter to be confronted by multiple tweets proclaiming how beautiful the day was. Everyone seemed to be outdoors except me. So after lunch, a little neighbourhood walk with Dave was in order.

We can only have been five minutes into the walk, and we were already ambling along the River Cole, which we're lucky enough to have at the bottom of our road. As we approached Sarehole Mill (see pic), we were jolted out of our mid-afternoon reverie by some sort of fracas between a couple of men on the other side of the "river" (at the risk of compromising my neighbourhood pride, it's really more like a stream - I think I jumped it once when I was out running). My initial impression, as I focused on the situation at hand, was that they might be drunk, but in any case there was something so aggressive about the situation that I was immediately ill at ease. I smiled one of those smiles that says please don't involve me in your drama and prepared to move on, but Dave had already started to engage with them. On our side of the river there wasn't just me and Dave - there was also a family of about 6 children with their mother. I was sure that at least two of the children were laughing. I turned to the men. One of the men, who was holding the other man down, told Dave, in the midst of a seemingly unstoppable rant, that the other man had been flashing his penis to the children, but was defending himself by claiming that he was actually taking a piss. He was clearly a paedophile, the man said (ranted). Dave calmly asked whether the police had been called, to which the answer was yes. When I looked back at the children, I realised that two of them were crying their eyes out, and as their Mum moved them on, they called out to their Dad, the ranter on the other side of the river.

We passed the mill and crossed over the road, and then before we proceeded with the rest of the walk, Dave stopped and went into self-doubt mode. "Have you got your phone on you?" he asked. Neither of us had brought our phones out. It's a new sort of downturn thing with me that I delight in leaving the house with as few possessions (generally money but other stuff as well) as possible. We wondered whether the man had really phoned the police. We agonised, like the couple of middle class liberals that we are, as to whether we should go back and confront the situation. We worried that the man was going to beat the living crap out of the suspected paedophile.

Above all, however, we questioned whether the man really was the paedophile he was accused of being. He looked like a middle-aged homeless man who might well have been relieving himself after an afternoon of drinking. On the other hand, it could have been more sinister. We waited for a while but the police didn't turn up, for whatever reason.

When I was little, one of my friends was a girl called Katie Warford and she lived on Church Lane in Ashton-on-Mersey. She would delight in recounting to me that the old man in the big house down the road would stand at his front door every Sunday morning and expose himself to all the church-goers passing by. We both thought it was hilarious. We were 10.

Thinking back then to this afternoon's incident, was it really the flasher that had upset those children, or was it in fact the angry reaction of their father and the intensely disruptive effect it was having on an otherwise playful and harmonious afternoon? Does the media's treatment of paedophilia prevent us from taking a measured approach, and in turn, is this causing children even more harm on top of problem itself (horrific though the problem unquestionably is)?

Dave and I copped out of the situation in the end. I argued that I had enough problems of my own without taking on someone else's as well - a position I've pretty much maintained since I intervened in an argument at a party when I was 21 and by some miracle survived the vicious assault that ensued.