Britain

So uptight these English. But then there aren’t many left in London.

I have this little game I play when I visit England: I see how many apologies I can collect in a day. Stand on someone’s foot, slam your rucksack into them, or just watch them meekly pass you in a corridor and the odds are you can harvest a meek or grumbled ‘sorry’. The same way that you’re likely to be showered with at least three expressions of gratitude before you make it out of the door when you buy a newspaper in a shop.

I hadn’t been in London for a few years and blistering cold and extortionate public transport prices aside, I would have had a hard time telling I was in England at all. On my first bus journey I counted 5 languages and guessed at 8 ethnicities. People of every colour navigated London’s infrastructure and I wondered if this is the shape of the future, cities with no nationality.

I was back to promote my new book, Bozo and the Storyteller and I had a plan. I’d printed up 5000 copies of the first chapter and was now going to give them out on the streets. Readers could try out the story and then download the audio version for free from the site. It was pure guerilla promotion and as I hoped the breakfast TV shows might pick it up, I arranged for it to be filmed to give them a taster.

I had a t-shirt printed up with the front cover of the book on it and if I’d forgotten that November wasn’t the warmest month to be dressed in one cotton layer, well, I never claimed to be a genius. I tried out on Portobello Road and blagged a table that was lying around to make myself a little stand. Things went well enough, chatting to the local heads and hitting on Colombian girls in London to learn some English (but how could they if no one here spoke it any more?) until a chap from the council came along to put an end to my fun.

“What’s this? Religion, is it?” he asked, glancing at my booklets.

“No, no, it’s the first chapter of my new book. Bit of publicity.”

“I see,” he said, rolling back his head, “So you’re distributing free literature in public. Are you aware that’s a prosecutable offence?”

Orwell! Kafka! Where are you now that we need you?

I moved on and tried out down at London shopping malls and Camden town but though people took the booklets, I began to realise I’d overdone things a bit with a print run of 5000. The boxes were heavy and I only had a week or so to hand them out.

More disturbing was the initial reaction of the public before I could explain just what I was doing. People tended to either shrink away from me in disgust or else smile with pity written all over their faces, the kind of look that said ‘Poor man, I would stop and talk to you but you’re clearly too far gone.’

“They probably think you’re a Jehovah’s Witness,” a mother told me after she took a booklet, “They were down here in force when this mall opened.”

Scuppered by Bible Bashers. What ignominy.

After that my initial zeal began to wane and I decided that ‘a leaflet in the right hands is worth 100 given away at random’ and only gave them to people with whom I ended up in conversation. I also positioned them with phone boxes, empty seats on the Tube and in an act of daring, inside other books on the shelves of Borders.

London, of course, couldn’t give a shit whether I succeeded or ended up in the gutter. The city flowed on around me, priced up to the neck and sanitised to the point of non-recognition. Even a trip to the supermarket left me holding my head in wonder as I couldn’t buy a packet of oats for my morning porridge without the packaging congratulating me on my choice of fibre. A packet of goji berries let me know I was on my way to the magical target of ’5 a day’, the recommended intake of fruit and vegetables. Even at the post office a sign overhead asked me if I had drunk 6 glasses of ‘cold, refreshing water’ that day?

The bookshops and pubs had already begun playing the interminable Christmas songs and I looked around for the fire axe to stick into the jukebox. The Xmas lights were up in the streets and sales everywhere reflected the hope to kindle that old consumer spirit despite the economy having been pissed up the wall by the brokers in the City.

I was born in the UK, I grew up speaking only English and I’m grateful for inheriting one of the best national senses of humour in the world. But each time I come back here the truth stares at me from every angle: I’m a foreigner.

Then again, in London, so is almost everyone.

Tom Thumb’s personal website
and you can find him on Facebook, too.

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