28 June 2001
Okay, if you work in the vicinity of Bond Street Tube you may have had your mandatory fire drill this morning. Some of the people in this area deserve to burn slowly to death in a pool of lighter fluid... but that just might be my opinion.
Sauntering through Cavandish Square I became aware that massive hordes of people in business suits were just standing there talking amongst themselves. You could even work out the social cliques. The young guys in the white shirts with no jackets... marketing. The middle-aged men in black double-breasteds... sales. The very few women in black pencil skirts beside men in blue pinstripe suits... admin and management. And the lone teenager having a cigarette on their own. Temp.
A little further on was the John Lewis muster point. Cunningly placed beneath a very tall tree that would probably catch fire quickly, dousing them in flaming leaves of death (hmm, sounds like that would make a good movie title). I hate John Lewis. I wouldn't hate him if his slogan wasn't "Never Knowingly Undersold", because that's the biggest printed lie in the world aside from "I did not have sexual relations with that woman".
John Lewis probably gets away with it because the people that shop there never need to go anywhere else. So they are blissfully unaware that in the real world DVD's that have been around for a year don't still cost £25. That PC games tend to retail for £30 on day of release instead of £40 six months down the line and that the Sony Trinitron KV-32 series is generally available anywhere else for £500 less than John Lewis claim it costs.
Call me picky, call me a cheapskate, or call me a shabby intellectual and proud of it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same people who run John Lewis own shares in a company I won't name... but lets call them Bixons.
They could do with burning down to the ground too.
In a little tangent, I went to school in what was the former Iraqi embassy in Paris, just off the Champs-Elysees. The school was an international bilingual school where rich parents sent their kids to learn french while they did things like... be the ambassador to the US, manage the opening of a Disney park, be one of the Israeli peace process team... regular dull stuff. I was the second poorest kid there, which by no means meant we were poor, however the poorest kid was Floridian White Trash and he knew it.
"Chip", because nobody called him Charles, saw the irony of an International school where Israeli, Arab, American and European kids intermingled in a building that had been the former Iraqi embassy best, during the Gulf War. Every Friday he would phone in a bomb scare just after lunch on his mobile phone (which at the time was of equal size to a brick) and we'd all file out of the school, mess around for a bit and then disolve into the masses of people on the Champs Elysees, knowing full well that the Bomb Squad wouldn't take it seriously again and not turn up.
We were sad to see the Iraqi's lose.
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