It’s only a South African thing!

Yesterday, like I do everyday, I walked to the station after work to catch my 16:35 train to Upton Park. After work I am normally quite tired from all the days’ hard work, ok maybe not ‘hard work’ but still enough to make me tired. My fingers start aching after searching the net for the whole day.

So there I am, walking to the station, completely oblivious to my surroundings and almost inside the station, when I stop to look around at the poster advertising today’s ‘evening standard’, what caught my eye, was the big picture of a little black boy. Normally I wouldn’t turn around to look at a picture of a little black boy, or any other little boy for that matter. But this little black boy, didn’t look British at all, in fact just by the small glimpse that I got out the corner of my eye, I could tell that he was African, snot running down his nose and tattered clothes. So to cut a pointless story about a poster short, it was advertising a free supplement (which I still haven’t properly read) about holidays in South Africa. What gets me is the picture of the boy, how on earth is this supposed to promote South Africa? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about that, there are already enough tourists in the country and with all the foreign investment causing me to pay more for everything, I’m glad the snot nosed boy was promoting my country.

So I went up to the man, paid my 40p, took the paper, and asked if the supplement was in the paper? ‘It’s only a Souf African fing’, he says as if I wouldn’t be interested in it, but pointed to a pile of supplements lying behind him. I picked one up, and replied ‘I’m South African’, he was instantly apologetic, his face filled with regret, mine with laughter and big smiles, I thought it was so funny, I look and sound (over here) so English its scary. All this while he was completely ignoring the grumpy looking business man waiting patiently to hand over his hard earned 40p for one of London’s worst papers.

‘No worries’, I said, took my supplement and descended into the darkness known as tower hill tube station.