In July 2008, I was at a spreadsheet conference in Greenwich. I stayed for a week after the conference, and walked to Woolwich several times. (An interesting find there was the Lithuanian and Russian CDs sold by a delicatessen in the shopping centre. Look up the folk music known as "sutartinės".) One afternoon, I was taking photos of the Costa Coffee by the market square, and two policemen stopped me and asked what I was photographing, and why. I had actually been taking pictures of the scruffy types sitting at the tables outside Costa eating their Big Macs; they were clearly not customers, and looked thoroughly accustomed to using the space as free seating, not to mention free rubbish disposal. The Costas I know in Oxford would never permit that; that the Woolwich one did, and that its staff didn't care, summed up Woolwich's decrepitude and decline. The police explained that an extension of the Docklands Light Railway was to be built under the market square, and that I might have been mapping the area in order to bomb it once the line was finished.
In July 2008, I was at a spreadsheet conference in Greenwich. I stayed for a week after the conference, and walked to Woolwich several times. (An interesting find there was the Lithuanian and Russian CDs sold by a delicatessen in the shopping centre. Look up the folk music known as "sutartinės".) One afternoon, I was taking photos of the Costa Coffee by the market square, and two policemen stopped me and asked what I was photographing, and why. I had actually been taking pictures of the scruffy types sitting at the tables outside Costa eating their Big Macs; they were clearly not customers, and looked thoroughly accustomed to using the space as free seating, not to mention free rubbish disposal. The Costas I know in Oxford would never permit that; that the Woolwich one did, and that its staff didn't care, summed up Woolwich's decrepitude and decline. The police explained that an extension of the Docklands Light Railway was to be built under the market square, and that I might have been mapping the area in order to bomb it once the line was finished.
ReplyDeleteOops. I realised that the year was 2007, not 2008.
ReplyDelete