Sometimes, you come across something which is so intrinsically wrong that just seeing it makes you wonder if the world knows what the heck it is up to. Things like Travis selling out Hammersmith Apollo, Jeffrey Archer writing a new book, or Pete Doherty not being dead yet.
To understand this post fully, you need to know that the area I work in seems to be some sort of haven for foreign schoolkids. I don’t know what it is about foreigners bringing their children to this country. I went on plenty of trips abroad with my school and I’m pretty sure that we didn’t spend our time wandering around in huge groups, blocking off the pavements and then deciding to congregate in exactly the same place as every other large group to have lunch. It gets so bad around here that I often end up wondering if we shouldn’t put the street signs up in French, German and Spanish. Throw in the Japanese and Chinese adult tourists and it is easy to end up feeling like Gulliver in Lilliput.
Of course, anywhere you get large numbers of tourists, especially large numbers of munchkin-sized tourists, you get purveyors of cheap tat, designed to part the visitors from their holiday money (and why not? How many of us ever change our left over currency back to pounds when we return from holiday?). You have to wonder, though, why, with such a wealth of utter rubbish to choose from, a large party of French scholars has just walked past, all of whom were under 13 and about 50% of whom were smoking fake cigarettes? You know, the sort where you suck on a white plastic tube and the end glows red?
On one level, you can see this as proof that the French race is never going to change. Cigarettes still seem to be good things, no matter how old you are – as evidenced by the fact that the half dozen teachers accompanying the crocodile of miniature garlic crunchers obviously thought there was nothing wrong with all of this. And it is also proof that money-grabbing pikey shopkeepers will never change, either, as shown by the fact that they clearly didn’t see anything wrong in encouraging the next generation of French smokers, even though there was nothing in it for them. Which is, whatever way you look at it, depressing in the extreme.
To understand this post fully, you need to know that the area I work in seems to be some sort of haven for foreign schoolkids. I don’t know what it is about foreigners bringing their children to this country. I went on plenty of trips abroad with my school and I’m pretty sure that we didn’t spend our time wandering around in huge groups, blocking off the pavements and then deciding to congregate in exactly the same place as every other large group to have lunch. It gets so bad around here that I often end up wondering if we shouldn’t put the street signs up in French, German and Spanish. Throw in the Japanese and Chinese adult tourists and it is easy to end up feeling like Gulliver in Lilliput.
Of course, anywhere you get large numbers of tourists, especially large numbers of munchkin-sized tourists, you get purveyors of cheap tat, designed to part the visitors from their holiday money (and why not? How many of us ever change our left over currency back to pounds when we return from holiday?). You have to wonder, though, why, with such a wealth of utter rubbish to choose from, a large party of French scholars has just walked past, all of whom were under 13 and about 50% of whom were smoking fake cigarettes? You know, the sort where you suck on a white plastic tube and the end glows red?
On one level, you can see this as proof that the French race is never going to change. Cigarettes still seem to be good things, no matter how old you are – as evidenced by the fact that the half dozen teachers accompanying the crocodile of miniature garlic crunchers obviously thought there was nothing wrong with all of this. And it is also proof that money-grabbing pikey shopkeepers will never change, either, as shown by the fact that they clearly didn’t see anything wrong in encouraging the next generation of French smokers, even though there was nothing in it for them. Which is, whatever way you look at it, depressing in the extreme.
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