“And what are you, may I arks?”
A goofy, eccentric black woman is getting on the bus dragging two kids, some shopping and her prodigious personality behind her. She is going to chortle and mumble to herself the entire journey, for now however, my attention is drawn to the right of me for the first time since I got on. It turns out I’m sitting next to an octopus on his way to a party.
A poster at the bus stop in Forest Hill lets me know that whatever sinister government agency that does these things is clamping down on benefits cheats. This raises my hackles straight away – I don’t receive any benefits, the advert is trying to make me feel guilty about something I’ve not only not done, but not even had the chance to do. Rather like the television licence ads, when you get to the nub of it, or rather the snitching number at the bottom, the sinister government agency is actually four people in headsets getting information from concerned Daily Mail readers and passing it on to the police. Instead of looking for the people who are breaking the law, they tell you they’re doing it and get you to do all the work yourself. It’s a great political black hole to find yourself in, expending a great deal of effort to make people believe you’re doing something you could have done anyway were you not trying to tell everyone about it.
What doesn’t help here is the picture on the poster – a large woman with a badly-fitting bra and gold hoop earrings that are supposed to scream a certain affluence and do just the opposite, giving the keen observer a brief but valuable insight into what’s hot in the Argos catalogue right now. But seriously – no wonder the civil servants at the Department for Equality and World Peace have got their work cut out when their own chums are printing identikit posters of fraudsters for people to look out for. Fat bird? Crappy t-shirt? Lock her up.
Not that I would ever be able to report someone for such crimes, my curtain-twitching skills don’t even stretch to recognising that the bloke sat next to me on the bus is wearing an octopus costume.