Me and my wife has been treated very differently from before in and on the way to Swindon. To get stares (usually from other Muslims), to get comments we are used to; I'm white British who dresses in English clothes, shes of Bengali ethnicity with a scarf round her head.

These last two days however has been very different.

Very isolated.

We've received abuse on the bus, abuse on the street, the humiliation of people immediately moving away from us to leave or sit as far away as possible when we sit down in the street or in a food establishment.

We have never, ever got that before, and I don't think that either of us are such bad people that we are known bad guys. We both work for a charity organisation, and I myself have gone in hundreds of houses in Swindon alone to deliver and pick up furniture for the charity.

The kind of words used by passers by and people on the bus include:

"Keep away from them she might blow up"

"I want to kill the people of Pakistan"
"What all of them?"
"No not all of them just the Muslims"
"That is all of them"

"Watch out for those terrorists they might do something, can we go somewhere else?"

"I wish they'd go back to their own country its not right them being here, its our country"

And you pretty much get the picture.

Its quite sad. I'm not in the mood to reply in the other blog post, if I feel up to it I'll try to get back to it.