Like any big city London has its ups and downs. Some people thrive, and others barely survive. Homeless people line the tube stations and some of the busy streets, while some of the most powerful businessman zoom around with little regard for anyone else, just their eye on the prize which is making the world market work. I’ve encountered both extremes, some very rich and some who struggle. The place where I work catered an event in their arena which was billed at 170 000 pounds for some hot-shot Insurance CEO. What does 170 000 pounds get you . . . an indoor forest with a built in waterfall, and young waitresses dressed in skimpy animal kingdom themes clothes. And five minutes down the road from my walk home, near London bridge, I gave a ‘left-over’ sandwhich to a beggar on the ground – the disparities couldn’t be clearer!
On a night off one evening, I was sitting on a bench down a side-road near St Paul’s, when out-of-nowhere runs a black man being chased by a policeman. The black man was manic, he grabbed some long wooden object to threaten the policeman; the policeman responded by pulling out a long metal baton/rod in retaliation. The Nigerian (as I spoke to him after this crazy encounter), started screaming “Leave me alone”, while the officer answers with trepidation “Calm down”! The officer has no idea if the Nigerian is going to swing, neither do I, but out of total shock all I know is, I’m watching my first major altercation in London town. But before the African has time to think of what action he will take, comes a couple of police cars with their sirens blaring, one directly upon where I was sitting from the other side of the small alley-road. That was fast! They pinned him up against the wall as he struggled, searching his bags and asking for his ‘papers’. It turns out he was totally innocent, and had every right to be residing in London. By any means, it was my work-mate who was breaking the law, drinking in public as we sat in the CBD where a drinking ban is readily in place. Therefore, my acquaintance was partaking in an illegal act, whereas this man was totally innocent, oh the way of the police and ‘racial profiling’! If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought this man was on drugs (after talking to him), it turns out he was the closest thing to such, an evangelical preacher, ordained minister Ebenezer Omirinde here to spread the word of Jesus Christ!
This isn’t the only incident of racial profiling? In the early hours of the morning after a night out at a friend’s in Dalston (East London), I was waiting for a bus home with my mate. The main road was totally dead, except for a pack of policeman searching a group of people of colour outside a closed supermarket across the road. My friend on a student-visa from Colombia, said, if the police knew he was from Colombia they would search him as well, due to the influx of illegal immigrants from Africa and South America. This friend though is part of the upper middle-class strata in Colombia, and wouldn’t be associate with such people, he claims to be “one of the good Colombians” meaning he has no connections with cocaine or any such illegal activities. I never judged him, not like the police here would. Whatever the case may be, the London police are forever present everywhere and anywhere. A day does not go by when I don’t see and hear policemen or their sirens blaring. Do I hang in dodgy areas . . . well I do live near to Elephant & Castle, a run-down suburb, and I like to frequent around East London, but still, its everyday!
I guess that’s the reality of being in one of the world’s biggest cities, there will always be activity, be it good, be it bad, be it wrong, be it justified, there is action upon every corner one peers around! And this isn’t just a paranoid New Zealander’s point of view, two girls from work (one a kiwi actually) have been mugged and had all their personal possessions stolen! The big bad city strikes not once, but twice!
One of my closest friends’ at work has a long-term Japanese partner, who he says he wants to settle with in her home-land. Why not here? Because he says London is no place to raise kids, and to be frank “it’s effectively a shit-hole”. I wouldn’t disagree, to an extent! Why? One clear example, is on my way to an art exhibition in Bow End, a driver started hooting at a father driving his kids in a mini-van, while he patiently waiting at an intersection to cross the busy road. This driver had no right to hoot at this family man on his day off on this fine Saturday, who just wanted to take his kids on a family outing. Nonetheless not to be out-done by this rude behaviour, the family-man (a working class father from East London telling by his accent), turned round and shouted out his car window “Fuck off you Fucking Wanker” and gestured with his middle finger as he drove. He did this in front of his kids, none of them looked older than 13. My word, I was like, this place is mad! I couldn’t do that in front of anyone, let alone my blockiest of friends, and this father just did that in front of his kids! This place, London, can drive people nuts, making them act out-of-the-ordinary, so I shouldn’t have been surprised . . . An article I read ranked Auckland in the top 5 and Wellington in the top 10, for cities with best standards of living. London was 52nd! He read an article that had New Zealand, Iceland, and Japan as three countries with the lowest crime rates in the world, who knows about Great Britain. The point is, this place certainly has its problems, but it has ‘life’, amazement, and activity happening everyday of the week! It really is an incredible place! Something that cannot be touched or mimicked anywhere else in the world, and totally original to London! From bums walking their dogs on the pristine Tate Modern lawns, to sharing a drink with a female dwarf actor that is playing one of the witches in Macbeth, to this and that – a new experience is bound to happen day-to-day if you look for it . . . like I do!
I almost forgot! An experience that may take the whole cake! After taking the first bus with my Colombian friend, we waited for the next bus to get us to our final destinations, our respective homes. The night was over, dawn was creeping in as we waited by the extraordinary view from London bridge! All of a sudden out pops an Eastern European (I’m guessing Romanian quite seriously) speaking a diluted gargled form of English, saying, “Do you have the entrance of work” and something about staying somewhere. He looked fatigued, stressed, like someone who’d had little sleep, and all he had was the well worn ‘clothes on his back’. I’d read on the tube just two days prior in the local paper, The London Evening Standard, that police were looking to remove homeless Eastern Europeans from the street. There are Eastern Europeans who came here to try find a better form of life, but not all make it and he certainly seemed to be one of the unlucky ones! On his way off, as we said we couldn’t help him, he asked for a cigarette to ease his pain (momentarily), he needed something much more durable though, a home, a job, his family? So London can be very harsh for some, and an eden for others, but for me it turns out to be totally interesting!
