This year The Phoenix Remix turns ten years old! To celebrate a decade, every Saturday of 2025 we are going to take a look back at some of the articles and interviews from over the years.

Name of Article: That Time When – An Elderly Man Punched Me. 
Original Publish Date: 30th September 2017

(100% true stories just names may be changed to protect identities. )

This may sound like a jokey name for a story but this was actually a serious matter and a physical attack that was reported and dealt with by the police. However enough time has passed to look on the subject in a lighter term but at the time I was very shaken up and made me weary of using the tube.

 
Back in 2015, I was on my commute back from work. It had been a very busy day of graphics producing and working at the top of North London and living in the bottom of South London means that the commutes were long – three or four trains to be precise.
I am very polite as a person and also towards strangers, even In rush hour. It happened in Green Park – I was in a rush to get to the next tube because I needed to get to Victoria so I wouldn’t miss my train.

 
I got off the tube and then was walking along the platform – there was a space that was big enough to walk through to my left but didn’t want to walk past as there was an elderly man and my thought was to ask politely if I could he through please – I could of got through the gap but didn’t want to accidentally bash an old person even slightly as he looked like a tourist who I got the impression didn’t go to London much.

 
That’s when it happened. I asked politely “excuse me please” to get through the man started shouting abuse at me and didn’t even turn round and punched me in the stomach – hard. This man was in his mid to late sixties and was with his wife. He knew that I was a woman, he never looked around so for all he knew I could of been pregnant. I wasn’t but that’s not the point.

 
I get on with people, especially the elderly very well and I have never some across someone that nasty in my life – I was Polite in the way I approached him and he decided to hit me hard in the stomach.
Writing this now I still even 2 years later the same feeling of upset comes flooding back. I have never been in that sort of situation before and never thought an elderly person would be someone who would do such a thing.

 
They say that young don’t respect their elders, but that day, it made me weary of the elders. I reported the incident to the police as soon as I got to Victoria.

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