London And The Brown Market.

There always seemed to be just three types of people in London; the Honest Poor, the Honest Rich, and the masses of Crooked Bums.
In suburbs of London are many, many people who live in large, comfortable houses, maybe tatty and run down, but large and comfortable nonetheless.

And nobody knows quite how they got there.

Some did it by honest hard work-such as working twenty years of 16 hour days in the City financial district.
Some inherited.
Some bought cheaply, a long time ago, when sudden windfalls were not unknown, such as breaking a leg at work or being forced out of a heavily protected job.

Some just won't say and nobody knows.They aren't big-time crooks. They are just in the right positions to 'do people a favour', a little at a time for many years.

There are an awful lot of these.
They believe in 'looking out for number one'. Guiltily, of course.
Their children are lawyers or doctors, with greasy palms and the immunity from suspicion that grants their crooked parents the carte-blanche of reflected respectability.

These are the people whose cynicism is beneath detection, chronic and endemic, picking up every lost wallet, screwing every advantage.
Time was, when large areas of London were resistant to these people, the honest working people watching every penny and keeping prices down.
But since the honest (idiot) rich came on the scene, more and more people have joined in the feeding frenzy, jacking up the price of everything from a plastic cup of cafe tea to a renovated council flat.

The honest poor didn't want to join the crooks, but since the crooks took over(in the name of protecting the working man), there are fewer and fewer places to hide.
You can't work in the docks.What's left of them.
All the local industires have been moved out of town in the financial pogrom.

Goods no longer come through London, except to be consumed.

So they sell out and join the 'service' economy, selling rubbish to the moneyed in an orgy of parasitic pretence.
And huge swathes of the urban landscape become the cold, alienated bolt-holes of the people who no longer smile or shake hands or talk, people who have no joy, only the desperation of another day's safety torn from the ant heap.

Society disintegrates.

And in the gaps where people used to meet grow the ambitions of gangsters, while all the while those just above the threshold of desperation block out their senses in a frantic denial of all the wrongness around them, with a seemingly 'macho' assertion that suffering is strength.

Well, it isn't.

It is just suffering, and every minute wasted in evasion of the obvious is lost forever.