Date: 17 February 2015. Happy birthday to Legally Blonde!

Location: La Bodega Negra, a too hip for words Mecian cantina under an adult video store in Soho. Waiting for Kennedy & the birthday girl.

Dumb ways to die in London. A handy guide for other neophytes.

1. Fail to be able to recite your complicated postcode – they have Zs! – off by heart on command. Be treated to a look so scornful you turn to stone.
2. Neglect your hand cream. The combination of frigid weather and constant balmy central heating wreaks havoc on your hands and nails. Neglect your paws and bleed out from the cuticles.
3. Ask a Brit about the difference between Hollyoaks, Coronation St and East Enders. Then add, ‘And what about Neighbours?’ Wither away as you politely wait forever and ever.
4. Take the Central Line at rush hour. If you’re not thrown down a twisted tunnel staircase or onto tracks, by the time you find yourself squished under an Indian businessman’s sweaty armpit and your right breast pressed fiat up against a Perspex window mammogram-style, you may wish you had been.
5. Be in London when it rains. The Tube breaks down leading to overcrowding of buses leading to the the slick, wet, treacherous pavement to becoming a battleground leading to people tripping and being run over. The end.
6. Walk down Oxford St. There’s no accepted rule in London regarding which side of the pavement you walk on. It’s maddening! Logically, you should walk on the same side as you drive — being the left. Signs in the Tube entreat you to keep left but to stand on the escalators on the right. In practice, walking down the street is akin to slalom skiing. Awkward step left step right dances with strangers occur daily. Walk down thrumming Oxford St and the impulse to maim a tourist or other slow walker will be irresistible. You may die in crossfire.
7. Queue. Die of boredom. I’ve never been to a land where people queue so solemnly, so silently and for so long.
8. Try to out drink a Londoner on a Tuesday night. If the alcohol poisoning doesn’t kill you, you’ll pray for the workday hangover to finish the job.
9. Visit Primark on a weekend. Crammed between 3 for £5 knickers, sweaty women in fleece pants and preteens in PU ‘suede’ heeled boots with over-crammed baskets, asphyxiate.
10. Say you’ve never liked Pret or actually respond to a greeting of ‘You a’right?’. Be shunned as tragically unhip and die of shame.
11. Call those things you wear on your legs ‘pants’, especially in a sentence like ‘Hey John, I really like your pants!’ Realise that pants means underpants. Die of acute embarrassment on spot.Love

Alex

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