Faint-hearted, stay away from London

View from the Pew
BY JAKE THACKRAY ILONDON: I NEYFit go there without coming back ome angry. The place could burn down for all I Care; if it wasn't for the people in between.
Louise and Peter met me off the London train at our little station to lift me home and when they asked how did it go I started swearing. I said how I hated the place.
"Tut tut, Jake, lad". They are the grandest people you could wish to know, these two. "Come come, old love: "Our capital city is a fine, dynamic, urgent place with noble streets and buildings, matchless museums, galleries, streets, squares, statues, halls, theatres, restaurants and a historical and cultural resonance that rings around our world not to mention the very thrill and buzz of a great nation's heart."
Yes, my dear friends, that may well be. But that morning, I saw a woman fall down in Old Bond Street. It was just outside Asprey's where you can pick up your Carder watch for nine grand or your Pacific pearl ear studs for a mere MO.
It was just opposite the Burlington Arcade which is the place to pop in for your Locke's hand-tooled gentlemen's shoes at only a couple of hundred and then it is only a shimmy down to Watchett's for a hair cut at only 30 quid.
Pierre Cardin and Coco Chanel are just over the road, should you want the sheerest cashmere pullover and the most exclusive smell all over you. Then you can just make it to Fortnum and Masons and Le Gavroche afterwards if you get a move on, but you may have to step over fallen down women.
When this old bird hit the flagstones nobody stopped. Mc, I am a provincial, so I stopped. Mainly to work out how to pick the biddy up and incidentally to watch the skill of the Londoners at avoiding her.
They swerved around and stepped over her, so anxious were they not to have to stop. Indeed they jostled and elbowed each other so as to be better able to get past this person on the pavement. They were Old Bond Streeters.
Now then, my dear Louise and Peter, I am no Good Samaritan, as you well know. The milk of my human kindness is not as gold top as yours is, but, fair play, where we live, if we see a human body go down in the street, we at least stop and talk to it.
Is it feeling all right? Has it got any plans for getting up
again and could we be of assistance in this? Is it bleeding? Does it hurt anywhere? Would it like a cup of tea and how many sugars? Has it got a name? has it got a home to go to?
Not that we are any worse or better than London people. We are simply luckier. We don't have to live there. Thus our precious instinctive solidarity and human kindness, our Godgiven caritas, is not in so much danger as theirs is. Granted, the woman who had fallen was middle-aged, pretty unwashed and there was indeed a whiff of methylated spirits. But there she was, on her back in Old Bond Street, getting seriously in the way of the shoppers.
Another man stopped. He was a courteous, compassionate, concerned Muslim. Born in Dewsbury in 1946, his name was Mohammed Stephenson, but I could call him Mo. He rang for help.
The Londoners kept swerving and stepping over and averting their Old Bond Street eyes, especially when the police car came and the ambulance with its WAII! WAH! WAH! In the richest street in Europe, this was a most embarrassing scene for the steppers-over.
Afterwards, when everything had been scraped off the pavement and discreetly removed, Muslim Mo, in the purest Yorkshire English, said to me, "Hey up, shall us gerra pint, I'm bloody parched. Then us'll gerroff 'otne. Us'll be righter at `ome than 'ere, tha' knows."
As we walked north towards King's Cross we saw many scenes of London life. On Oxford Street we counted 47 beggars, most of them very young and lots of them obviously ill.
At Centre Point, we saw a mugging as people walked by. Going through Bloomsbury, we gave some coins to a whole family who were living in a cardboard village outside the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar.
Outside the British Museum, we gave some more small change to a man who appeared to be dying. He was lying by the railings on the south side, beneath the posters for the GraecoRoman exhibition. The sight-seers were having to walk round him.
My dear Louise and Peter, there are indeed wonderful things to go and see in London.
Trouble is, on the way you have to step over an awful lot of other stuff on the way. Including your caritas.