Romping In Romford

(Above: A mural on the pavement of Romford's market area. In case you were wondering.)

A memo to myself: don't sit at the back of a bus. They're magnets for arseholes, idiots and the banal. Like the trio of very loud, lurid girls who walled us in as they got on and went straight to the back where we were sitting. They all had absurdly bleached hair of a tone normally only associated with albinos and Boris Johnson. Their clothes were gaudy and sparkling, like they were going out to a nightclub, even though it wasn't even noon. And they wore lots of junk jewellery, which clanked and changged like chainmail. They weren't chavettes or your common or garden toerag though. Just young and silly and thoroughbred in their Essex Girlishness. My only real complaint was that they kept putting their feet on the seats, which really ought to be grounds for exile to South Georgia.

It was hard to keep up with their stacatto wittering, but some snippets stay in the mind:

"Yeah, oo's that gel? Ain't she gaar'n to th' Sickth Form? Stoopid Cahh!"

"I've never bin ta Sarrfend before. Is it true the sea gets bigga if it gets rained on? I've goht sicktee paahnd so I'll get really smashed there!"

"Y'knaa, if someone stole flaaars off my family's graves, I'd faaaaking kill 'em!"

"Stop takin' photahs of me, Shell, ya bitch!"

And so on. Halfway through our trip, we drove past a white plaster-coated house with the legend 'Pixy Cottage' written on it. You'd have to wonder what kind of fae folk would live in the Dagenham-Romford wastes, as it's hardly the sort of place where fairy dust flows freely.

Later we were sitting down for a coffee at an outside burger bar in Romford Market. The day was gloriously sunny. Suddenly I saw a strange bearded man in dark clothes and sunglasses in the distance. He slouched down and started running towards us, around the back of the burger van and then around the seating area, past the corner and into the market once more. He was holding a pair of numchucks, but whether he was the local ninja assasain, I couldn't really tell.

At the end of the day, while queueing for an ice cream in McDonalds, we heard the following pearls of wisdom from two lads behind us - young enough to still be living with their parents, old enough to ponder the meaning of romance:

"Yeah, like, she's sooo immature, y'know-what-I-mean?"

"Mate, at their age they're just too young to know what love is."

"Tell me abaaht it, mate, tell me abaaht it..."

It sounded rather silly and yet profound, like the sort of wisdom that could only come from a broken heart.