Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Ride ‘em Cowboy!

Now I’m liberal sort of guy. OK, I may crack jokes about the French not fighting in wars and I may snigger when watching Brokeback Mountain, but apart from these slight traces of racism and homophobia I’m generally a stand-up sort of guy, a live-and-let-live good fella (and I don’t mean the sort of good fella who goes around killing gangsters).

But even I am sometimes perplexed by 'difference' and yesterday I witnessed something I’d never seen before.

On the way home from work myself and the missus stopped off at Piccadilly Circus to buy a present from HMV and we crossed the Trocadero to reach our goal. At the bottom of this tourist hell hole is a picture shack where people pay money to dress in all manner of period garb to have their pictures taken so they can show them to the folks back home what a right larf they had in the Smoke.

Anyway, myself and the missus walked past this and getting dressed up in Wild West cowboy garb was a chap of Middle Eastern extraction while his missus (in full burka) was donning the guise of a saloon prostitute so she could pose by her man. Needless to say, she was still wearing the full burka…

Now I admit I stared. I stared a lot. I then pointed this out to the missus and she stared too. We briefly looked at each other in a confused sort of struggling-for-meaning way then walked on to HMV.

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