out and about around oxford circus

This afternoon I saw Ulrika Jonsson, or at least I’m 99.9% sure it was her, walking out of the Nike Shop at Oxford Circus. It was only after I walked past her and minder that I realised how much a photo of her buying an England shirt would have been worth – the tabloids would have faught tooth and nail for the photo proving she “just can’t get over Sven”. Mind you, as far as I know she was buying a Brazil or Trinidad and Tobago or even USA Soccer jersey. Or Sweden. Anyway, opportunity missed, but for good reasons (her privacy, my dignity) I think.

Whilst crossing the road, trying to quantify the potential loss of income I’d just had because I refused to turn myself into “citizen paparazzi”, I noticed that the Hare Krishna’s seem to have taken over the spot that evangelist with a loudspeaker, 52 year old Philip Howard, preached from before being giving an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) in May. I used to walk by Howard everyday when I worked at Broadcasting House and have to admit that I only once really enjoyed one of his “shows”. That was around Christmas when he looked at two or three women, dressed to the hilt in designer gear and teatering dangerously on extremely high heals as they carried as many bags as they could manage from Selfridges, Fortnum and Mason, Liberty and other famous high-end London shopping emporia – anyway, Howard looked straight at them and said – “it’s Christmas Eve, do you have room for Jesus in those bags?!” At the time, I wondered if he gave any Christmas gifts and, if so, how he found the time to do his shopping considering he seemed to be outside, on his tannoy, preaching to shoppers all day.

Next, I headed to the apple store where I sat through a number of sessions on ipods, one on garageband (which was interesting), asked a few questions of the mac gurus, and then worked as various people came and went from the various sessions. One of the people who attended the WeMedia Fringe was there for much of the day too but we didn’t sit together (working power points are few and far between, so to speak).

At some point, I got hungry so wandered down to Brunchies, a little cafe that has a fantastic £4 vegetarian all day breakfast. The waitress is Polish and her Polish friend, who works at the tanning centre on the corner, came in and they had a chat without realising that I understood most of what they said. When I went up to pay, the waitress remembered that I have a Polish wife and so understand quite a bit of Polish and chuckled – they’d been talking about boys and jobs whilst chef, who couldn’t speak Polish, walked back and forth looking staring at the tanning centre girl’s long tan legs. He mumbled something quietly in Arabic whilst peppering it with various noises of approval: “mmmm” and “ummm” were the ones I heard most. After a few minutes, the tanning salon woman went back to work and the waitress started counting the money in the till and the chef went back to the kitchen.

I like that about London. No, not the mini-skirts, but the multi-cultural make-up of the place. On my (much later) walk to the tube station I saw expectant Brazilian football fans watching the World Cup in various pubs, a “taxi” drive by with a Ghana flag dangling out the window, and various other people wearing uniforms or draped in flags I wasn’t immediately able to identify.

There was no wifi and I was working so I headed down to Benugo which, for the price of a coffee, does have free wifi. I’d been there for a coffee earlier in the day so had an hour’s worth of passwords so simply parked myself outside, smiled when waiters and waitresses came in and out, but avoided eye contact as I didn’t really want to buy anything else. It worked, at least until they started to close down for the evening, at which point I headed back to the Apple Store where they were running yet another iPod class but which, this time, was mostly attended by over 50’s. At least, they were the ones who were interested, the rest of us were there for the free wifi which the presenter pointed out several times during his presentation. I did learn something though – that it’s important to deauthorise your iTunes library before wiping your computer clean. I did that when I got home and, since then, have been working on reformating and reinstalling the operating system on my old 12 inch powerbook G4 (which, by the way, I’m going to be selling – get in touch if interested).

I could have documented the whole day with much more depth, or maybe interviewed some people and annotated it with photos or video, but I don’t know what you’d think of it. The same goes for last week, when I walked around Shepherds Bush for an hour or two, wanting to talk to and photograph people but thought it might be wasted – and unwanted – effort on my part. Which brings up my question – the more I become interested in blogging, citizen journalism and the like, the more I want to do a bit of it myself. Not a whole lot, maybe once or twice a month. It wouldn’t take the place of other content here. Instead, it would be additional content, not entirely related to the usual industry stuff you’re used to reading, but also quite useful in helping me think about and practise the things I preach.

So what do you reckon? Can you put up with, or maybe even enjoy, to ocassional citizen journalist type of post (see above) or would you rather I stick with my usual subjects? I’d like to hear your thoughts.