High Misanthropy in Old London Town

As I went to get a bus at Holborn, I heard what seemed like a choir of banshees slitting their own throats. It turned out to be a gaggle of young teenage girls, middle class, and reeking of hormones and cheap perfume, all shrieking as some pigeons flew low over them. Partly they were doing it out of genuine girly fear of the yucky. But they were also doing it as a way of bonding, a shared experience of being annoying. Being a twit is a great unifying force.

A stout Asian security guard came out of a shop to see whether the screams were rape, theft or murder. But a rather aloof young women in a green coat told him, as she walked past, that it was just "some silly girls". She then nearly barged into me as I was on my phone and not paying attention. I got a dirty look.

Once on the bus, I went past the girls again. They were still running wild and had now started fencing each other with rolled up free newspapers while moving down the street at a pace. The Easter Holidays are hell.

I got on the tube some time later. At London Bridge, a tramp boarded. He was reasonably tall, had a short beard and a black woolly hat. He smelt of booze and stale sweat and wore grubby dark clothes, with a large empty-looking black sports bag over his shoulder. He could have been anywhere between 20 and 30. The tramp was swaying slightly and not just from the motion of the train. He took out a piece of folded cardboard and opened it up. Written in black marker was the legend:

Hungry
Please give generously
I need food.
Thank you very much

He then gave a long rambling slurred sales pitch about sleeping rough on the streets and how he needed to buy a sandwich and perhaps some other food, and then he asked politely for any money from the "ladies and gentlemen" in the carriage.

Almost no one, including me, gave him a penny. But a man sitting next to me - bald, with glasses and wearing a DPM combat jacket - gave him a few quid and gently asked him to only spend it on food. The tramp thanked the man and then everyone else (who gave him nothing), and got off at Borough. He walked unsteadily onto the platform.

The rest of us, and me too, barely even looked at him. We were either too embarrassed (shamed even) or callous to care. True, he would no doubt have spent the money on alcohol or drugs or both. But that did not stop us being just a few amongst millions of sour, stone-faced, surly commuters, neither caring nor cared for. All we really worried about was not looking at the next person in case they thought we were weird or wanted to have sex with them.

After some business that had to be done, I found myself walking down Clapham High Street, past the now abandoned local branch of Woolworths. An Estate Agent's had put up a sign that said the site had been 'secured' for 'interested parties'. It was dark and empty inside. The security cameras at the doors were still on though. The monitor showed a blurry monochrome view of the world, with me and the other passers-by appearing as vague grey ghosts as we walked by in turn. Soon all memory of the place will be gone, and with it, any trace that we walked by that day.