Current mood:	tired
Current music:	Art of Fighting

Sad Masquerade
So, a little over a year in London and someone finally tries to mug me. In a way it feels overdue; an initiation to the local neighborhoods that somehow passed me by because I was too busy with simply wondering where the hell I was.

But I need to correct myself. It wasn’t ‘someone’ who tried to repossess anything of value I may have had on me so much as it was a pack of idiot teenage boys and girls. I’m somewhat intrigued, and equally annoyed, by the whole experience. It’s the disservice at large that such a confused act of cowardice propagates that grates the most. Perhaps I should start at the beginning.

Train arrives and I get off, change the album I’m listening to, trudge through the gates and exit at the best point to walk home from. Getting a bus won’t set me back anything, but I’ve taken to making the last phase of the journey on foot. A matter of seconds after getting up the stairs and a complete stranger is putting his arm around me and taking a peculiar interest in what I’m listening to. There are two possibilities here: either he’s a bit of a nutter, or he wants something. The fact that he’s telling me to ‘relax’ before I even have a chance to tense up – heaven forbid my body be given a chance to vindicate his apparent concern – and pulling me along at his own walking pace suggests the latter. Some not-too-clearly-recalled dialogue follows.

“What’s that you’re listening to?”
“… Music.”
“You don’t seem to understand. What’s it you’ve go there?”
I procure my PSP from my jacket pocket, bundled up in its no-frills carry-case and happily streaming a few Crowded House B-sides, and hold it at a safe distance.
“Lemme see it.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Why not?”
“I’m happy enough listening to my music and keeping to myself, and frankly don’t feel any need to pass the device to anybody I don’t know.”
At this point he’s moving in front of me and has grabbed a mixed tuft of my jacket and bag-strap. A quick panoramic observation shows that he’s brought along a good amount of company with him, probably somewhere between fifteen and twenty extra pairs of hands, and they’ve been quite happy to walk up behind and surround me. I turn back around, fully aware of my situation but more peeved at it than anything else.
“Hand it over!”
I put my PSP back in my pocket, and receive a punch to the head from a guy standing just to the left of me for my troubles. I’d honestly expected worse, and from as far as I could tell none of them were actually armed, and as a result I’m completely unphased by this. This seems to confuse the lot of them. It’s as if they expect people to either topple over, cry or shriek out in pain from one little bit of violent physical contact as sort of default response – generally I’ve always thought that your average human can take a bit more than that. In any case, at this point an anti climax is reached as I somehow manage to wrestle myself free, turn around and simply walk away. And that was that. I simply turned, and strolled (although I imagine that I strolled briskly) off.

Now for why this annoys me. I live in Canada Water, one stop away from Canary Wharf on the Jubilee line. It’s a fairly docile place, and while not as monotone as some particularly pompous parts of the city, it’s certainly not the most culturally diverse. There’s a small Asian sector to the area population, but that’s mostly it. While personalities and attitudes come in all shapes and sizes, I can’t help but feel that a decent number of locals – consciously or not – probably see the area as a nice, safe, white community. I also can’t help but feel that the fuckwits I ran into a couple of nights ago probably expect this to be the case, and through certain nuances in how they spoke and carried themselves, were intentionally trying to play up the fact that their skin is much darker than mine – as if a different colour could somehow become an endorphine that would carry the personification of fear itself. The only result I can see here (and I’m assuming that they’ve pulled this stunt before) is that they’re intentionally embracing negative stereotypes in a way that is only going to reinforce them (especially if sensationalist local media ever gets involved), simply because they see it as an easy means to a ‘see, want, have’ attitude. I’d rather them have been white simply because I could then write it off as and blame it on chav culture in general, and not give people an excuse to go home with an extra layer of racist perception.

All told though, I guess this is the most interesting thing to have happened to me in these past couple of weeks. That and seeing Stardust, which is really imaginative and wonderful and not at all unlike watching a live-action Ghibli film.