Oh What A Circus

London has been a strange place to be over the past week.

I suppose that if you’ve visited the capital lately then calling London strange is an obvious thing to proclaim, up there with saying nudists like taking their kit off, Salman Rushdie is a smug, unlikeable, smarmy git, and Britain has a housing shortage because Labour politicians all seem to own four homes.

But London has been stranger than a politician’s expense form over the past few days and the reason is that we’ve had some gatecrashers invade our town, setting up camp like a band of travelling caravan people and leaving their rubbish behind for the rest of us to clear up.

This particular unwanted travelling circus was called the G20 Summit, and ringmaster Farmer Brown had invited them in to his field to have their picture taken, behave like clowns, and perform their daring acrobatics as they U turned like mad and performed magic tricks by lowering the average IQ of the city. We’ll probably find our house prices have likewise fallen too.

Some of the world’s best known political leaders, and Gordon Brown too, seemed to come together for lots of eating, lap dancing, nit combing, paintballing wars, flower arranging classes, cookie making and, in Sarkozy’s experience, walking on tip toe and getting cramp in your feet from trying to look taller for three days. Photo opportunities looked like a school outing with the boys ignoring the class frump, Merkel of the German language class, and fighting to sit near either the head teacher, Mrs Liz Windsor, or the good looking girls’ captain from Argentina.

What I don’t understand is just when these leaders had the time to sign any kind of deals on global recovery, or anything else important, as their every moment seemed to be filled with media opportunities to show off to their countrymen back home. The Italian leader, Silvio Berlusconi, even had his hair dyed specially for the event with “blackboard shade 10” and upset everyone by behaving like an Italian waiter who never shuts up and hassles you the whole way through your meal wanting to get your date up for a dance round the pizza oven.

Well, the leaders have now all left with their great holiday snaps and star packed home movies, and even now they’ll be handing their colleagues souvenir shirts from Oxford Street with My President Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T Shirt printed on the front. But what have we got out of it?

Well, in London, what we got was a couple of days of demonstrations, disrupted transport, closed roads, long, long delays getting home and the odd punch up as thousands dressed in black hoodies tried a spot of decorating of our city and themselves. Pouring fake blood over each other and smashing windows makes for a good day out in some quarters, but the London newspaper letter pages were full of readers who had obviously weighed up the pros and cons of the protest, ignored stereotypes, and were urging the police to use water cannon on the hoodies to give them a wash.

Comedian Russel Brand showed his fearless empathy with the anti capitalist movement, and his quiet, modest, support by joining in the demonstrations with a full camera crew and minders spending less time than it takes him to do his hair.

I walked behind some of the demonstrators to the tube station on Thursday evening as they chattered about how they had really taught the World a lesson in caring for others and saying No to greed. They were the politest, best spoken rebels I’ve ever heard and I would not have been surprised to see one take out a hip flask and pass it around while arranging to meet for a pheasant shoot in August.

As they all laughed over their adventures they ignored a woman who was sitting at Vauxhall station asking for change to feed herself, and they missed the irony in the fact that the only person who put money in her paper cup was a bloke in a pin striped suit.

This recession has brought out the worst and the best in people and I believe some who looked down their expensively white dusted noses before are now coming to terms with a new feeling of humility. But the recession also leads to a bit of humour. Watching TV and listening to radio I look forward, for the first time in my life, to advertising breaks as the media have to take ads now from people they may have overlooked before. My favourite is the jingle for a London clinic which performs cosmetic breast surgery. Over the backing singer yodelling about “My Life, My Breasts” a voice says customers will get to see a qualified surgeon from the British Association of Plastic Surgeons. For brevity the voice says those looking for new breasts will see “a qualified BAPS surgeon.”

But, back at the G20, much as I was annoyed at the delays in getting home I felt the demonstrators weren’t the worst at causing upset. The biggest upset for me was perpetrated by Michelle Obama.

The First lady of America visited a girls’ college and told the young ladies that they were the future and, even though she’d never met them before, she loved them all. As the carefully inserted emotional catch in the voice echoed around the news footage, the contents of our collective stomachs rose as one, suggesting a new advertising campaign which seemed to sum up the whole, ridiculous, event.

Throw Up? Yes We Can!