The One With The Journey Home
One of the things I love about London is how much interesting stuff can happen in such a short space of time.
Coming home from work tonight, walking down King William Street as usual, I was jostled by a group of drunken city types who were either too inebriated or just too generally rude by nature to pay much attention to other people's personal space or, indeed, toes. They were the loud braying type of group who clearly have a collective self image of being young vibrant beautiful people, the envy and adoration of those unfortunate souls around them. I managed to escape them by upping my pace to the lights, but one of the guys (blue and white striped shirt, beige slacks, ugh) caught up with me and instead of stopping, stepped straight out into the path of a huge no 344 bus, which was rounding the corner at a pretty dangerous speed itself, and would never have stopped in time. I managed to put my arm in front of him and stop him walking off towards certain death; he stumbled backwards and completely ignored me.
Once the rest of the group caught up, they all clustered round me waiting for the lights to change. At one point the traffic slowed to a halt and a black cab with an aged and turbaned driver stopped close to us. One of the group - not the one I'd pulled back from the road - started shouting through the cab driver's open window asking if he was Osama Bin Laden, and telling his friends to stop the cab because he'd caught a terrorist. I was so disgusted at what I was hearing. I just hope that the cabbie - who just looked calm and tired through the whole thing - saw my expression and realised I wasn't with them. At the first opportunity I redoubled my pace to get away from them all. God knows what produces these awful people - I'm certain none of my friends would act like that.
Anyway. Just when I'd started wondering what had become of the world, something nicer happened to make me feel better. Coming up to London Bridge I noticed that there were loads of people lining the bridge looking East, way more than usual at 10pm. I thought there must be something happening on the river, especially as they were all taking photos. But as a reached the bridge I realised that it was just a perfect photo opportunity that had drawn them there - the full moon was bright yellowy-orange and huge and low in the sky, right above Tower Bridge, which was all lit up silver and gold like it always is at night. It was quite the perfect view. And it made me smile because I realised that I didn't need to take a photo, because I'm lucky enough to see that view every day.
I did, however, take a rather grainy photo of the moon above the rooftops on my street, just to show you how bright it was:
See? Way better than streetlights.
Coming home from work tonight, walking down King William Street as usual, I was jostled by a group of drunken city types who were either too inebriated or just too generally rude by nature to pay much attention to other people's personal space or, indeed, toes. They were the loud braying type of group who clearly have a collective self image of being young vibrant beautiful people, the envy and adoration of those unfortunate souls around them. I managed to escape them by upping my pace to the lights, but one of the guys (blue and white striped shirt, beige slacks, ugh) caught up with me and instead of stopping, stepped straight out into the path of a huge no 344 bus, which was rounding the corner at a pretty dangerous speed itself, and would never have stopped in time. I managed to put my arm in front of him and stop him walking off towards certain death; he stumbled backwards and completely ignored me.
Once the rest of the group caught up, they all clustered round me waiting for the lights to change. At one point the traffic slowed to a halt and a black cab with an aged and turbaned driver stopped close to us. One of the group - not the one I'd pulled back from the road - started shouting through the cab driver's open window asking if he was Osama Bin Laden, and telling his friends to stop the cab because he'd caught a terrorist. I was so disgusted at what I was hearing. I just hope that the cabbie - who just looked calm and tired through the whole thing - saw my expression and realised I wasn't with them. At the first opportunity I redoubled my pace to get away from them all. God knows what produces these awful people - I'm certain none of my friends would act like that.
Anyway. Just when I'd started wondering what had become of the world, something nicer happened to make me feel better. Coming up to London Bridge I noticed that there were loads of people lining the bridge looking East, way more than usual at 10pm. I thought there must be something happening on the river, especially as they were all taking photos. But as a reached the bridge I realised that it was just a perfect photo opportunity that had drawn them there - the full moon was bright yellowy-orange and huge and low in the sky, right above Tower Bridge, which was all lit up silver and gold like it always is at night. It was quite the perfect view. And it made me smile because I realised that I didn't need to take a photo, because I'm lucky enough to see that view every day.
I did, however, take a rather grainy photo of the moon above the rooftops on my street, just to show you how bright it was:
See? Way better than streetlights.