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Andy Dawson of the @getinthesea Twitter account shares a few London phenomenons that he thinks should, er, get in the sea.
Teeny tiny rental properties
If you could translate the London rental scene into a piece of classic literature, it would make Dante’s 'Inferno' sound like a fairy story. It’s 2016 and people, actual human people, are being asked to interpret a London garage as a ‘studio flat’ and join in with the charade that it’s worth 117,000 of your English pounds. Meanwhile nearby, half-starved people sleep under a bush.
That London Garden Bridge
Joanna Lumley might well be a national treasure, but if her batshit bridge ever gets built, it immediately needs to be hacked apart and allowed to flow down the Thames and out into the sea. Any idea that’s got the backing of Boris Johnson (who in himself is another of London’s many atrocities) should be rejected without a single eye being blinked. After all, he’s the pioneer of the cable car that hardly anyone uses, and his middle name is de Pfeffel. So bollocks to him, bollocks to his childhood friend Joanna Lumley (see what’s happening here?) and bollocks to the Garden Bridge.
Those signs on the tube
Stop creating readable distractions. Just get to where you need to be as soon as is physically possible. If we want bite-sized motivational messages, we’ll look on Facebook.
Themed dining shite
There’s been a lot of hate hurled in the direction of Cereal Killer Cafe over the past year or so, and quite right too. But it’s just the visible tip of a diabolical iceberg – themed cafés and restaurants are springing up everywhere you look as people with no self-awareness translate their dense dining ideas into awful realities.
A café full of owls? It sounds like something from a cheese-fuelled nightmare, but no. After School Club, a school dinner-themed restaurant serving up the kind of grub you hated as a child, but at £55 a head? No.
Come Fry With Me – a restaurant that combines the previously unassociated worlds of commercial aviation and chips? Are you fucking serious?
The McDonald’s marathon twat
YouTube blogger James Ware recently ate a different dish at all 46 McDonald's outlets in London in a single day. Who hurt you, James? What did they do to turn you into this raging, attention-seeking pisslord?
Infantilisation
Not a strictly London thing, but there’s more of it in the capital than anywhere else. Ball pools in office meeting rooms, adult soft play, those clowns who dress up as animals (with tails and that) and hang around together. Grown men called Barnaby loafing around on beanbags in offices on Silicon Roundabout, playing oversized versions of Ker-Plunk and Buckaroo. If World War III started tomorrow, we’d be absolutely fucked.
The Queen’s ninetieth birthday party
Glossing over the gnawing fact that she’s got twice as many birthdays as the rest of us, just how much money does a monarch actually need? There can never be enough, if the £150 ticket price for her upcoming ninetieth birthday street party is anything to go by. Will she be selling bespoke souvenirs from out of the back of a horse-drawn carriage as well?
Maybe Her Maj should take a leaf from James Corden’s book and do as many ad voiceovers as she can muster, while appearing to be richer than 60 percent of the nations on the planet.
Painted logs in Muswell Hill
Recently spotted by an eagle-eyed Get In The Sea follower – on the face of it, these looked like standard logs with a bit of brightly-coloured paint splashed on the ends. For a tenner a go. Do they float? Because they’re headed straight for the fucking sea.
London tea pubs
There’s a tea pub in the offing. A. Tea. Pub. Called ‘Brew’. It brings the word ‘pub’ into disrepute.
The brainiac behind this scandalous concept, Alex Holland, said: ‘Brew is a place with the atmosphere of a pub but instead of ordering pints of beer, serving pots of tea. As well as serving loose-leaf throughout the day, at night it will provide tea cocktails like our Earl Grey and Tonic or Lapsang Old Fashioned.’
Alex Holland should be hauled through the courts by the National Pub Federation. And then propelled into the sea.
Juicing crawls
The cult of juicing in itself is bad enough – hordes of messed-up, broken individuals convincing themselves that everything will be better if only they can swallow down blended piles of cabbage, kale, beetroot, sprouts, damsons and fucking kumquats.
But worse still, some of these crazed self-abusers are ganging up and taking it to the streets, going on juicing crawls around London, getting giddy on vomitous concoctions that smell like the kind of stuff you’d usually pour down your bog in an attempt to unblock the u-bend.
Look back at last year's London trends that can stay well in the sea.
Andy Dawson's book 'Get in the Sea: An Apoplectic Guide to Modern Life' is out on February 25.