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Threats of physical violence
August 14th, 2007 at 01:53
When I was down in London the other day, I was with Katy, and we went for lunch at Pizza Hut – it was the one near the site of the failed Tiger Tiger nightclub bombing in Piccadilly Circus, so we were really living life on the edge.
As we were sitting waiting for our food, for some reason Katy made a vague punching fist gesture towards me (you’d be surprised how often my friends seem to do this to me) for conversational reasons that escape me (for the sake of context, assume it was after a hilarious sexist quip).
Suddenly, one of the waiters chipped in: “No fighting in here, please… you’ll have to take it outside”. He was perhaps 40 years old and sounded like a proper cockney – I imagine he is the sort of person who would use rhyming slang as a matter of course rather than when trying to sound like a Londoner.
“What have you done?” he asked in his best cockney accent, to which I could only manage to respond with genuine but perhaps slightly over-forced laughter. “Do you want any help?” he said to Katy, as he himself clenched his fists and mimed a punching motion.
Its not that I don’t mind receiving threats of violence from strangers… it’s just a little odd. And it made me worry as he looked like the sort of bloke who might “know some people”.
Maybe he used to be a contract killer, but work dried up when the made murder illegal a few years ago, so he’s turned his hand to waiter-ing (waiting?), and has a lot of pent up aggression?
After we’d finished eating he came back. Rather than ask if we wanted the bill or whether everything was alright, he again made his hands into fists and said directly to me with some faux-indignation “Are you still alive?“. It was almost as if he’d expected me to be a bloody corpse by the time he returned.
I don’t know what it is about Piccadilly Circus – first terrorists try (and fail) to bomb somewhere close to where I was two days after I was there, and now a passive aggressive threat. Weird.
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