This is Kent Calling

Dear Marianne,

On my journey through London yesterday the announcer at London Bridge tube station took time out from telling us to move down the platform, stand behind the yellow line and stop being so mardy, to encourage us to have a bottle of water with us at all times to avoid dehydration as the temperature will reach 35 degrees today. I liked his concern though and it caused at least one spontaneous conversation to break out amongst the gloomy city folk.

I was in London on my way to Wrexham to interview a race walking Olympic gold medallist who really did get dehydrated during the Rome Olympic Games in 1960, he was in the lead with only 8km of 20km to go and then he was on his face on the ground.

I booked a wake up call last night for 6am – the person on the other end of the phone said they could do 5.55am or 6.05am which caught me off guard and I spent ages considering my options. I really did want 6.00am.

I was pleased to find myself awake at 5.40am so that I would be able to take the call wide awake! But then dissasterously fell into a deep sleep and woke to the sound of lively jazz piano playing in the hotel lobby of my five star hotel somewhere exotic– then woke to the sound of the phone ringing; answered it with a ner...er...

When I got home I was so knackered that I sat and watched any old rubbish on the telly and I managed to catch a woman in her sixties, lower m/c, kindly, delicate looking husband leaning on her arm, being interviewed on the local news (cat up tree-dog down ditch!) last night.
The subject, not surprisingly was immigrants (always to be confused with asylum seekers/foreigners/terrorists/convicted criminals etc.) and she said that she thought “we had got enough now and we shouldn’t have anymore." She said it so sweetly and with so little malice, that I thought she might be talking about biscuits. What did she mean by enough? Has she carried a figure around in her head for years, and now, privvy to numbers on immigration the rest of us don’t have, she finds her personal target reached. Or does she “feel” that there are enough – it only takes one poorly clothed, differently coloured, stuttering english, confused looking neighbour to bring some parts of the south east to a halt.

It must have been somewhere in Kent – I have been got twice in Kent in 6 months by Radio: the first guy asked me to tell a joke he had written down which was un pc I dutifully obliged and then he asked me to say it again “with more oomph”! Why did I say it again? The second bloke wanted my opinion on the “hundred minute bible” I felt so churlish after my “I’m an atheist – so I don’t care “ that I followed it up with a feeble “but there are some good stories in the bible so...”, but he had wondered off by then. This compares favourably though to my response to a tv crew during the queens “annus horribilis”. On picking up the guardian newspaper from Smiths in Victoria station, the interviewer asked, “do you think that the media should be able to criticise the royal family?”, my dashing response was: “they’re up there saying what they want so people down here should be able to say what we want” – what, what, what!? I swear I could see him thinking the word “drivel”. I told myself off (out loud like my dad) all the way to Bromley, and then tried to catch news bulletins all day just to check they hadn’t used it.

Rx