You Know You're In London When...

1.KGB SPY POISONED TO DEATH BY POLONIUM - Anyone outside the UK following this? The tabloids are eating it for breakfast. Put simply, ex KGB spy died here about a week ago after Polonium poisoning, which is a form of uranium that's only lethal when ingested. Turns out after they found he was about to go, traces of it have been found throughout the city wherever he'd been...his home in Muswell Hill, a sushi bar in Piccadilly, now on various aeroplanes, and a couple of places relatively close to home for your correspondent i.e, the Sheraton Park Lane, where I've done three gigs! and the poor guy died at University College Hospital, one tube stop down the road in Euston where a girl I was briefly involved with is studying medicine of all things....
So the back story is that Putin in Russia is about to hand over power and this guy knew some secrets that could blow the whole process. It seems like an incredibly obvious way to get rid of someone, as well as a pretty good way of sending the largest city in Europe into radiation frenzy....

2.WHALE SWIMS PAST COMMONS - this was about six months ago, and I was walking back from Prets (sandwhich shop) to my shift work office when I saw the headline by the newstand. It was like something out of 'News Of The World' and doubly bizarre considering that I was in the city of London at the time, a handful of blocks from the river. They gave it a name, and the inevitable happened.....crowds of onlookers, poor thing got confused, it stayed around for about five days, they tried to ship it out to sea and it died on the way. Perhaps another remotely related sign of what we're doing to the planet on a larger scale?....

3.OUTBREAK OF EBOLA VIRUS IN DALSTON - this is more an urban East End myth I think, but someone was telling me a while ago that the fairly deadly and contagious Ebola virus, known to exist in certain parts of Africa, is stored in dead animal flesh, which could possibly be illegally imported as bushmeat through various African communities and into central London for a possible second outbreak. Third world Africa and the East End, eh? Still, I reckon Londoners should be more worried about the proliferation of places like Chicken Empire - there's some wrongness in those two pound hamburgers somewhere....

....moral to the story? This is a town where absolutely bizarre and potentially life-threatening events occur on a regular basis.....

....but the strange thing is, with all that and the old world inefficiency and ridiculous bureacracy and pollution and how small and cramped everything is, it's almost as if you start to warm to the wrongness, a case of contempt breeding familiarity.....

.....just another day I suppose....