What a Week

what a week it has been. firstly, by gosh, how about those olympics hey? what's this? china? only gone and won it already hey, what cheek. by golly, what a regeneration strategy that was. east london, flooded with tourists, all spending their money in olympic restaurants, the locals didn't know what hit'em, its like '97 all over again. blur, they're there on the old countup to 2012 in music . yep what culture we have it's amazing. i cant get enough. they run. they swim. sometimes they even throw things. meanwhile, i met a man in the sainsbury's near waterloo who told me that he had killed his family. he had a reebok bag, i recall, in which, so he said, was his wife's head. as with all people that i meet, i remained polite and nonchalant, unable as i am to convey emotions. of course i had my doubts, people say those kinds of things to you of an evening in a sainsbury's, it's best to nod and smile. but there it was, only the next day, on the news: man kills family, goes shopping. only most of us didn't hear about it because of the olympics. such are the priorities of the press. the one person who i've found who was completely disinterested in the olympics was a refugee from syria. she had different concerns. maybe syria, but also the rain. met her in a bus stop, where both of us were sheltering from the rain. when the bus stopped we both fanned it away and she said, are you taking the bus or are you afraid of the rain? afraid was a too strong a word, i thought, but, i answered, the rain. she concurred. all these folks, misappropriating bus stops , i thought. we talked while the rain pelted on the roof. we talked about the security council and the departure of kofi annan. we talked about why we, us, the west, think about going in, we at least consider such things, whilst completely ignoring places like the congo where big things go down. finally we talked about giving up our plan to go to the respective places we had planned to go to and go back to my house, which eventually we did.