almost witty

The School of Life has opened up in Central London, which sells itself as somewhere to “try out a variety of cultural solutions to everyday ailments”. You can embark on courses in the meaning of life, work, play, love etc., “travel holidays” where a real expert takes you to places (such as the overlooked delights of Heathrow Airport with philosopher Alain de Botton), a bibliotherapist who can suggest books for you to read, “sermons” from leading experts in various fields, or conversational meals which come with conversational topics as well as food.

I can’t decide whether this is a cool way to introduce new thinking into our retail-obsessed culture (which I’ve largely opted out of), or if it’s just an incredibly pretentious sad statement of affairs on our society.

As I got on a random London bus this morning, I grabbed a copy of freebie newspaper The Metro which was lying on a bus seat. As a freebie newspaper (supported by advertising, given away across London and other major cities), it has a discernable value of, well, zero. Aside from the articles inside, which are of the same level as the international coverage of your local American paper ie it’s just copy from the news wires.

However, the paper was evidently of some value to the woman behind me, who sat down with an audible harumph and tut. I offered her the paper, to which she snootily replied “Oh no, I have a much better paper!”, and proceeded to loudly take out some copy of The Literary Economist (not a literal title, but something of that ilk) and concentrate on that. Even though I’d put the paper back down on the bus seat so she could read it.

The bus proceeded to where I had to get off, and as I was waiting for the bus to stop, I noticed her putting down her better paper, and grabbing the Metro as if her life depended on it. I never knew something that’s available for free would be so valuable…

London bus

Originally uploaded by E01

Thanks to incredibly slow London traffic, I managed to spend three hours on the 266 bus route between Hammersmith and Brent Cross, and back. It wouldn’t be so bad but I got to Brent Cross *just* when all the shops were closing. I was starving at this point, and even though there was plenty of food out on display - because all the shops were closing up their tills, nobody would sell me any. Damn nit!

The plus side in my mini-trail across half of London is that I did spot a few random London moments, including:

- one chap who got on the bus, and spent the next 30 minutes loudly listening to, and nodding along to a rap music album. Stored on his phone which he was listening to by keeping it against his ear, and generously sharing it with the rest of us grumpy passengers. And he had bling-bling white trainers on. And he was white, just to defeat another stereotype.

- spotted a taxi parked on the side of the road, and next to the taxi was a man kneeling on a prayer mat, praying presumably towards Mecca

and your random London link is this series of images musing on what 2090 London would look like, once it’s been flooded.

Living in London, finding small flyers advertising prostitute services are pretty much everywhere on the landscape. (Although being a weirdo, I do fondly remember walking into my first London telephone booth outside London Polytechnic at the tender age of 16 and deciding that that was where I was going to apply to university. Naturally, in the end, I didn’t).

So I have been chortling over the last 10 minutes looking at this week’s B3ta image challenge - to imagine what it would be like if celebrities and pop culture merged with prostitute flyer cards. Too many great ones to choose from, but the ones for General Zod, Rick Astley, Victoria Wood (?!) and Helen Keller are brilliant…

Over the last weekend, I have observed the following people on the tube:

- One short naturally bald and slightly older man, and one tall shaved-bald younger man. I’m assuming they were together because they got off the tube train together.

- One woman with dyed blonde hair that failed to hide the grey roots (thus looking like a female member of Status Quo), talking animated and enthusiastically about something. And her companion, one of those mid-30s women trying to look like a teenage boy complete with plastic shellsuit top, and lesbian-savvy black T-shirt failing to hide a reasonable amount of boobage, nodding sagely as if taking in all the information. But she was probably thinking ‘Shut the hell up, I just want to kiss you’. Or something.

- Two women on the tube, dressed in a bizarre set of costumes. One woman, who was naturally well-endowed had augmented it with a ridiculous set of falsies, and her companion was a very thin, frail blonde woman. And they both carried light sabres. Asked them about it, apparently there was an anime/sci-fi convention nearby.

Which was handy information, as later on, waiting for another tube train, one arrived and expunged a veritable busload of young women, all in various anime/sci-fi costumes. Which is unusual.