Bass Encounters

My flat - Cooking together for the first time

I made this, for.... reasons

I Went to America - It Sucked

Another Movie Mashup

I haven't posted for a while, so here's something creepy I found in my backlog

I think I may have been a little stressed....

Royal Olympics

Not really sure why I made these...

But there are more coming.

London's many visitors

As non cave-dwellers among us may have noticed, London will soon play host to that magnificent orgy of televised grim-looking healthy people that is the Olympics.

There will be triumphs (I’m told many of the sports feature some competitive element).

There will be Spectacle (there have been numerous sightings of people carrying a flaming stick).

There will be people, and lots of them, and this is the part that I’ve been beginning to notice.

Yes London, already famous for its wide open spaces and voluminous tube system, is starting to fill in preparation for the upcoming weeks of sport, and it’s starting to get noticeable. Not that I blame the people of course, after all the Olympics is possibly the only time you can tell someone that you’re going to spend the weekend watching something like table tennis, and not be thought of as the local weirdo. But the fact remains that London also has other stuff in it, which evidently a large number of people have thought they’d sneakily visit before the games.

Which means that now, more than ever, the people of London are treated to an opportunity to watch and study that most curious of beasts, the tourist.

Of course, being middle class and currently living in London, it’s hard to suppress the knee-jerk reaction caused by the cigar smoking old man who lives in the back of my brain and yells “damn nuisances, get them off the streets!”, and to a certain extent  he’s right.

It is annoying having to force your way through crowds of gormless frowning zombies, all jointly squinting at their phones as they try to take a picture of the same tube station sign, just to get on a train, and it can get tiresome listening to the babble that inevitably surrounds them as they applaud street performers, point at landmarks and ask loudly for directions. Most people in a city have somewhere to be at any given time, but the tourist is there to see the city itself, and so by definition must be in the way of everyone else.

Despite this, I’m surprised to say that I don’t really mind.

I like being in a busy, thriving and active city, and considering the monumental strife clouds that pour out of the business section of the newspaper every time I open it, it’s rather gratifying to see cafés, pubs and galleries doing such a roaring trade. London needs trade and it needs tourism, and more and more I’m beginning to appreciate that without tourists, it’s likely that large chunks of the stuff that makes London fun simply wouldn’t exist. Seeing the London Eye every day may be cool, but the truth is that it’s not there for my benefit, it’s there for the people who want photos of it, in it and of themselves around it, so that their friends and relatives can bask in the glory of their holiday on facebook.

The point hit home when I saw a red phonebox covered in velvet (for reasons unknown at this juncture) surrounded by more people with cameras than the average B-list celebrity, and I realised in that moment what a wonderful thing it was that we as a city could afford to put that sort of thing there just for the amusement of passers-by.

In fact, seeing the admiration with which people treat such trivial things as phoneboxes, black cabs and policemen makes me rather proud of this country and of this city.

Now, when I see someone taking a photo of the Thames, or Covent Garden Market (where I work incidentally) rather than inwardly sighing and wondering why anyone would want such a digital keepsake, I now feel proud in the knowledge that the city in which I live is regarded as so incredible by tourists as to require photo-evidence of its awesomeness.

So, long live the trade of photos with beefeaters, novelty mugs and pointing at stuff, because it means that I can walk the streets of London and occasionally hear someone say “wow, isn’t that cool!”, and I smirk to myself, and think ,"hell yeah, I live here".