The past two weeks have seen the streets of evening London turn into a battleground of rival newspaper vendors trying to palm their respective freesheets off on passing punters.
In the purple corner in London Lite (spelt just like that), the bastard child of the Evening Standard and Metro from Associated Newspapers whose vendors dress in bright purple tops. In the other purple corner is thelondonpaper (honest, not capped or punctuated just like that), the hip upstart from News International whose vendors also wear bright purple tops and dish out their wares from under stands with bright purple umbrellas.
This means myself and the missus can now no longer walk from work to the Tube (a journey of about 10 minutes in total) without at least four folk from either rag accosting us and pushing their publications right under our noses.
Just outside Waterloo is where the freesheet battleground is at its hottest with one very vocal vendor deafening all around him in a bid to get rid of his pile of papers. Each paper has at least five or six folk here and into this mix this week came several people from a mental health charity.
Bizarrely they also wore bright purple tops and it just all got too confusing with the soundscape loop going something like this:
‘London Lite! Free London Lite!’
‘thelondonpaper! Get thelondonpaper here!’
‘Mental health. Mental health concern here!’
Only in London could something this bizarre seem entirely commonplace. And only in London could everybody just walk by and totally ignore the sheer lunacy of it all…
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