The new demography
Thursday, January 19th, 2006 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddymanThis morning I have mostly been playing avoid the beggar; it is an old London pass-time which has been practiced for hundreds of years.
Of late, it has been in decline what with the gazillions of pounds pumped into tackling homelessness by various incarnations of Her Majesty’s Government1. Those remaining hardcore beggars have been of the standard variety:
I noted a few days ago how I had been accosted by a man wearing a donkey jacket and knitted woolly hat. He claimed to be of all things, a priest from Latvia, and he bummed a cigarette.
Anyway, there has clearly been an influx from the Baltics, since a similarly dressed man2 but with notably poorer command of the language (not helped by a very thick accent) stopped me and asked for money. This chap claimed to be from Lithuania. I only need to meet an Estonian and I have collected the set.
On a side note, in the game of find the waste paper bin, a little routine I indulge in every morning in the office, after the cleaners have been inventive the night before, I am win. I found it immediately by the simple expedient of nearly breaking my neck when it leapt out at me from under my desk. The cleaners aren’t trying any more.
Maybe they’re making a lucrative living pretending to be immigrants from the Baltic states.
1Trust me when I say the amount of money invested since I have been aware of the scheme could have bought a mansion for each homeless person in the country several times over.
2From now on, the standard New York dockworker/Irish Navvy look of denim jeans, donkey jacket and woolly hat will be reinvented and referred to as Hanseatic Chic in honour of this latest influx from the east.
Of late, it has been in decline what with the gazillions of pounds pumped into tackling homelessness by various incarnations of Her Majesty’s Government1. Those remaining hardcore beggars have been of the standard variety:
- Old street gentlemen with a preference for drinking neat methylated spirit and arguing with lampposts;
Young women with babies looking pathetic on the Tube;
Invasive buskers;
Abusive and very large Yardies.
I noted a few days ago how I had been accosted by a man wearing a donkey jacket and knitted woolly hat. He claimed to be of all things, a priest from Latvia, and he bummed a cigarette.
Anyway, there has clearly been an influx from the Baltics, since a similarly dressed man2 but with notably poorer command of the language (not helped by a very thick accent) stopped me and asked for money. This chap claimed to be from Lithuania. I only need to meet an Estonian and I have collected the set.
On a side note, in the game of find the waste paper bin, a little routine I indulge in every morning in the office, after the cleaners have been inventive the night before, I am win. I found it immediately by the simple expedient of nearly breaking my neck when it leapt out at me from under my desk. The cleaners aren’t trying any more.
Maybe they’re making a lucrative living pretending to be immigrants from the Baltic states.
1Trust me when I say the amount of money invested since I have been aware of the scheme could have bought a mansion for each homeless person in the country several times over.
2From now on, the standard New York dockworker/Irish Navvy look of denim jeans, donkey jacket and woolly hat will be reinvented and referred to as Hanseatic Chic in honour of this latest influx from the east.