Some menacing looking year 10 lads from the local comprehensive school, who are always on the back seats at the back of the bus when you get on for your commute to work are much, much harder than you, even though you are a 45 year old man, a study has confirmed today.
Long thought to be the case from anecdotal gossip and posts on community facebook groups about some 'thugs causing mayhem on buses - what is the problem with the youth of today?', the research found that teenagers at the back of the bus joking and vaping could lay you out with a single punch, no problem, and what are you staring at anyway, old timer?
The researchers controlled for a range of other factors thought to be associated with schoolkid hardness, including the age of the first appearance of bumfluff style facial hair, the amount of implausible stories of sexual activity that they boast about with each other, and the number of direct classroom confrontations they had had with a supply teacher.
'Whilst this study identifies a residual toughness even after controlling for all these things, we still don't know whether there is a self-selection bias', noted a nervous teacher on bus duty at the local school. 'Do the hard kids opt for the prestigious back seat, out of some feeling of entitlement? Or does the act of sitting at the back embolden kids of average 'hardness', causing them to swear a lot, and play with their crotch in a distracted, but nonetheless threatening manner?'
'It would be good to run an experiment to place the hard kids on a seat half way down the bus for a week to test this theory', noted the teacher timidly. 'I suggested it to Logan and the rest of the Brookdale gang, but they suggested that I F@*k off back to the hole I came from.'