Oxford Circus Part 2 (Blog 12)

Today was the day of a free, outdoor confidence workshop. No, let’s be honest, today was the day of me hanging around, chilling out and not really doing anything of any importance. Despite my constant encouragements to join in, I’m simply more of a comedy writer, not a firefighter, as previously explained. To start this day, whilst early and on my own, I treated myself to a mid range burger. It was expensive enough to have had removed the dirty ingredient found in brands such McDonalds, but not expensive enough for me to really enjoy it. I would have ate the thing indoors, but I was soon facing two other diners, and I had a compulsion to look at them every few seconds, out of curiosity. My own habit made me feel uncomfortable, so I left, with my now takeaway, for a busy street. As I was eating, my mobile phone fell out of my pocket without me noticing. If there’s one thing good about the terror threat in London, it’s that discarded items get noticed VERY quickly. Had the threat been lower, I may have lost the thing, so it’s not all bad, is it? Then I had a £5 smoothie. That had to be good, as it was labelled as a ‘special’ one. Why would a smoothie lie? Especially as the products often brand themselves as being ‘innocent’. Well, after about half of it, it went into the bin. Idealising its apparent righteousness, I ignored the fact I didn’t really like its ingredients of oats, and I’m not huge banana fan, either.

Afterwards in the same area, I met up with the confidence maniac, I’ll now reveal to be Joe. Soon after that, his friend Richard, came along. (I got the technique of withholding the names of people, and creating a sense of intrigue from The Simpsons. Paid off, didn’t it?) Anyway, this Richard was the German version of the personality you now know and love. One of the first things he said to me was ‘let’s jump up and down, who cares?’ Then he started jumping. There must have been 100 witnesses. Lol. Wtf? Ok, well, whatever, it was soon time to move on, anyway. After a two pronged attack of pedestrians getting chatted up, (nope I didn’t join in, not now, not ever, just let it go) we ended up in Selfridges. Excellent. It was now my opportunity to show off my special watch knowledge. I told my mini group that clocks are usually sold at around ten minutes past ten, so the hands are in a smiling position, and are therefore more likely to be bought. Yes, subconsciously people want to buy happy watches, have a look at them in displays, for yourself. Once I got a chance to prove myself, unfortunately it was a bit of a letdown. I was hoping for the glory of getting a response like ‘whoah. You truly are the king’, but all I got was ‘oh yeah.’ Oh well. Digressing slightly, here’s a thought, I should have brought up, at the time… Do watches for Goths, sell at twenty past eight? Hm.

Anyway, it was also in Selfridges, I got to hear the German’s secondary, and more unique take on chatting people up. It went a little something like this… ’Me and my people just have a habit of starting world wars. It’s in our genes.’ Wow. I know that was meant as a joke, but really? Here is one of the chat up lines, I’m more familiar with…. ‘Hi, is your name Google? Because you have everything I’m looking for!’ If you analyse that one, you’ll find no references to armed conflict whatsoever. Far from it. That is also the pattern to all other lines I am familiar with. Why he didn’t seal the deal and start to jump up and down, is a mystery, and let’s be honest, a further disappointment. Just perhaps, that is the explanation why he didn’t have any luck.

After that… differentness, we stopped off at a busy Chinese eatery, and Joe and Richard ate outside. (I was still full on burger). As was expected, Richard ate in a more efficient manner. Joe kept on going on about eating healthily, but I don’t really care about all that stuff - too dull. Did you know that there is one theory out there, that the dinosaurs became extinct, because they died of boredom? That’s a fact that’s harder to believe than the watch one, but I assure you, I read that in a museum, many years ago. Once everything was eaten, it was time to do some more jumping, in the middle of the street. Due to my competitive nature, I had to outdo to war monger. Luckily for me, there were some fire hydrants (I think) for me to try and leap onto. Sadly, they proved to be too challenging to land on and conquer, due to their curved tops, but I guess that was the intention. If they were more flat, what would be the difficulty, and therefore fun? And before you say anything, there is nothing weird about two grown men trying to jump onto large objects in a crowd.

To finish off, what’s less weird still, is a group of people later going their separate ways. And that’s what happened, as I had to go to the London Comedy Writer’s meeting. This is what the journey to the event sounded like…. ‘Chuggachuggachuggachuggachuggachugga’, etc., etc. Let’s continue to beef this paragraph up a bit, to try and create a stronger sense of consistency. It’s good to have each paragraph roughly the same length as each other, after all. (I couldn’t think of anything else to write in the third paragraph, that needed more words, too. Yes, it was a passage that happened to be very small, little and short. Or as the French say, ‘petit’. Germans say something sounding very aggressive, for the word ‘short’ most likely. As do the Scots. Actually, now that I think of it, MAYBE my other sections were too long… Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm). Alright, that’ll do. To sum up; confidence building, then meeting. Hayrlashuv!