Olivia Joules’ Neighborhood

Guitar man - the David Gray meets James Blunt dickhead who lives in the upstairs flat - played his latest creations this morning. He didn’t start until 10am for a change, but with my late shifts that was far too early. Now I can’t see properly, and it is to be a long day as a consequence.

The moment the first chord was strummed I was awake and unhappy. I dragged myself out of bed, aware that sleep was over, and opened the curtains. It's an absolutely glorious day. I opened my window, then sat up on my window sill to look up at the upstairs flat. Unfortunately the window was closed, so shouting at him wasn’t going to be effective. I will write him a strongly worded letter.

But at least it’s a nice day, and I enjoyed the walk down to the station. My train was full of normal people excited about the gorgeous weather so filled with the inexplicably desire to spend a day on Oxford Street. I was surrounded by Daily Mail readers, all scrutinising articles about how current London Mayor Ken Livingston enjoys secret exotic banquets of the Queen’s swans and halal haribo with terrorists and, worse, asylum seekers, or whatever their latest non-story is.

Then I noticed that on the local Kingston paper I was reading was an advert for Ken’s campaign. It consists of two squares, representing the two plausible choices. And next to the squares read:

DON’T VOTE FOR A JOKE       
VOTE FOR LONDON                

Then at the bottom: “DON’T RISK LONDON. VOTE KEN”.

Obviously the majority of political advertising in the past 50 years has been variations on the ‘TIME FOR A CHANGE’ vs. ‘DON’T LET THE OTHER PARTY RUIN EVERYTHING’ messages, but I thought this was a pretty effective one. So I thought I’d do a little experiment – on the tube, I sat holding that page of the paper out, hiding my face, ostensibly for the purpose of reading the story on the other side. Which was about swans, funnily enough.

I watched people’s reactions from the reflection in the glass to the left of me. Most of them looked at it and either looked amused or ashamed, but didn’t say anything. But then a couple got on at Piccadilly Circus, didn’t have much to say to each other, so eventually the conversation turned to the paper I was increasingly obviously holding up for political purposes. The guy was about twenty, and was wearing a red rugby shirt.          

“I’m gonna vote Boris”, he said. My heart sank in an unsurprised fashion. Rugby fan in 'votes Tory' shocker.

“Why are you going to vote for a joke?”, replied his girlfriend. The tone of her voice indicated not that she had balanced up the various pros and cons of the candidates and had come to the measured conclusion that Johnson is lacking in actual policy, but that she hadn’t really heard of either of them and just wanted to mock her boyfriend.

“Cos Ken’s crap”, he said. Then he went on to explain in a paternal and patronising tone why Boris was the right candidate. It was a collection of half-remembered and mangled election soundbites, but basically what it came down to was: Boris is going to bring the Routemasters back.

Basically, we’re doomed.