The Big Smoke

‘Love, love.’ A woman’s voice intones with a hint of desperation behind me. ‘Love, love.’ I keep walking. Love’s strange stuff and you never know what will happen if you invite more of it into your life. Best left alone, then. But she’s determined.

‘Love, love, love.’ She continues. ‘Excuse me, love.’ I give in, turn to face the sound and find a woman in her fifties standing in the rain. She doesn’t love me. She’s just northern, and she wants my attention.

‘Yes?’

‘What’s the way to Oxford Street?’

As we are standing on the Charing Cross Road, at the junction with Oxford Street, the question seems superfluous but I show her. A small kindness perhaps, but it apparently makes her very happy and she sets off beaming, straight for hell. Feature continues

I pause to wonder why anyone would want to go to Oxford Street. I know the answer is clothes shopping at unbelievably knock-down prices but which clothes, no matter how knock-down their prices, can be worth the misery? Certainly not clothes that fall apart but that, according to several articles in the popular London free press, is exactly what a lot of Oxford Street clothes are likely to do.

Bad news for older shoppers and the northern woman, who would rightly object if her new skirt and pants disintegrated as soon as she got home and her genitals went on unexpected display in a public house in Barnsley. And what about Kate Moss’s range for Topshop? Is the country’s favourite person from Croydon (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor aside, obviously) in danger of walking out of the house fully clothed and then suddenly finding herself the best part of naked (but not for the usual professional reasons)?

I’m afraid not. In fact, Topshop clothes simply don’t fall apart – though those who love Moss will be outraged even at the thought. But then I’ve yet to meet a Londoner who loves Moss. We’ve nothing against skinny women on the piss, of which she is among the best, but she isn’t really a Londoner’s heroine. Her appeal and that of her mwa-mwa lifestyle is, Evening Standard journalists aside, to people who live outside London. The people who pack out Oxford Street and out-of-town shopping malls, intent on buying as much low-rent fashion knocked out by three-year-olds in south-east Asian hellholes as they can.

We shouldn’t be snobby about these people. If they want to wear jeans that are designed to cover two knitting needles even though they possess gherkins for legs then let them. After all, many Londoners don’t understand the process of getting dressed properly either. That’s why it is possible, as I did this morning, to see a man in his mid-thirties wearing a baseball cap and a patterned hooded top, with his trousers halfway down his arse. Fair enough if he were off for a spot of ill-advised retrospective skateboarding but this man was walking into an office. To work.

Was his appearance an ironic aping of youth culture’s iconography, working his daywear into a knowing social commentary? Was he exhibiting an admirable rejection of society’s oppressive insistence on the usefully employed being conventionally turned out? Or was he just an idiot? Hard to say for sure but I opted for idiot.

We’re all idiots if we think buying stuff is the answer to our problems. The Government, being the biggest idiots of all, are happy to see us sold things that fall apart because, as soon as they do, we are obliged to buy some more and the whole financial cycle is kick-started again. I’m not sure what the definition of a moral vacuum is but a national policy of ‘buy shit all the time’ might qualify.

What can we do about it, other than wearing robes and voting for the Natural Law party at the next election? Maybe the northern woman in search of Oxford Street was accidentally right; the answer might be a lot less shit and little more love. In which case, mid-thirties man in a baseball cap, with your trousers around your knees, I am sorry. I love you.