Surviving Customer Services (Part 3)

Pipex were prompt. I can’t fault them on that. Email had turned out to be much the same option as Southend pier. They can’t accept queries by email (along with semaphore and deliveries by donkey) and could I log a case via their web page? There was a definite rumbling in the grumble magma, like someone had given Vesuvius indigestion, but this is the internet age, so I do just that, copying and pasting my previous email into their web-form, answering those sixteen pointless questions that are the online equivalent of whatever booby traps that Indiana Jones must face to retrieve the fabulous golden turds of the Aztec hyena, and provide every detail about myself short of my inside leg measurements and a psychological profile. The following day I am rewarded by a response. Can I provide my details so they can locate my account and prove it’s me and not someone else trying to correct my terms of service (if so, where can I find this generous individual and thank them)? Well, of course I can I re-input the information, it’s the same information I had to provide in order to submit the case the day before. They’re making it easy for me, I can copy and paste. I’m a child of the Internet age. I see light at the end of the tunnel, I shall soon be untied and freed from my download limit bondage.

Not yet though, the next message from Pipex says "sorry, you’ll need to contact TalkTalk customer support to discuss this, it’s such privileged information that we’d be executed and our families shipped to Siberia if we so much as even gleaned even the slightest knowledge of your predicament. Please don’t say another word, think of our families!”. Can they forward it, I mean I am a Pipex customer after all? No. That would be tantamount to knowledge that the problem exists and the death squads would be upon them, crashing through the skylights and tasering their first born. Could I stand the guilt of that? Well, if you do ask, I could. OK, OK, rather than build a giant death tractor and drive it through the front doors of their HQ and embarking on an orgy of farm machinery related destruction not bettered since the Tobe Hooper-directed remake of Animal Farm (“piggy’s gonna squeal”), I’ll try once more with the more reasonable route.

The drill is familiar. I copy and paste the complaint into TalkTalk’s web-form, answer the sixteen challenges of doom, add my psychological assessment and click submit. The next day, my inbox pings (it does literally), and “can I provide…" Of course I can, I gibber, feeling the magma start to kick like a volcanic baby. I am the copy-and-paste ninja! So that verify that I am in fact me. And that I’m not a TalkTalk customer. The rumbling grows ominous now. I so want my death tractor.

No worries though, it didn’t really matter as they can’t deal with the query anyway. See, I’m with the wrong kind of customer service, I need the other kind of customer service.  Why don’t I instead call their ‘Customer Retention’ line? I can have them sort out there own problem and I can pay them to do so. See that: their problem, my money, it’s genius. Well, it’s a bargain, I’m sure sex lines and casinos in Monaco are far more expensive ways to amuse yourself.

Except I’ve already written a single paragraph that perfectly and precisely states the issue. It’s a small package of neatly wrapped explanatory perfection. It’s lean, mean and to the point. It would not benefit from being yelled down the phone at some distant village idiot. It’s not debatable or arguable, and I feel no great urge to discuss it (beyond the 2,000 words or so I’ve already written on the subject). So, TalkTalk, rather than me waste more of my time by forcing me to invent a time machine and zap myself back to the beginning, why don’t you just unblock the damn process and pass along my query to your Retentions Team? I mean, you are a telecommunications provider, after all. Telecommunicate!

This cannot be done. TalkTalk have taken the game of outsourcing to an entire new level by locating their customer services team outside the realm of normal time and space. They are apparently tucked away into a cul-de-sac of space-time where normal communications simply cannot work. They have taken the underlying brane of the universe and tightly wrapped their customers services team like an impregnable christmas present designed to delight and then drive the recipient to despair, as they lose their fingernails and are generally reduced to screaming like they’ve found themselves starring in Saw XVIII. From within their fold in the fabric of the universe they can’t email or phone, or otherwise contact the retention team. Even if I attached giant plasmas drives to the death tractor, it couldn’t get inside.

The BT Subscriber's Complaint Resolves Itself

It’s not all bad though. We’re not in a one-sided, abusive relationship here. They’re willing to give a little back. For instance, I get access to thousands of X-Factor tickets. On hearing this, I was stuck with the grim knowledge that all those years ago I may have pressed the wrong button and ordered an unlimited broadband service when, all the time, I had intended to order the tickets to an experience I would anticipate is akin to gouging out my own eyeballs with a rusty ice cream scoop while being fucked in each ear by two horny donkeys on Viagra. We all make mistakes online, and some can’t be undone by deleting your browser cache and immersing your computer in undiluted bleach.

Of course, the aim is to survive. To not be beaten by the system. It’s easy to let the grumble magma erupt, fling fury into the sky. But in land without ready access to a surfeit of firearms, what’s the point. Death tractors probably require expensive modifications. You can’t just tint the windows and hope no one notices. Take a breath, let the magma cool. All is not done.

No, there’s an opportunity here to volley this case back and forth in a childish game of “please pass this on,” “I can’t”, “well, I’m not”, “but we don’t…” and just see how long it takes. It’s day three now. They’ve done the impossible though. I sudden have a rosy recollection of many happy days talking to BT Customer Services. I can’t remember what went wrong between us.

Surviving Customer Services (Part 2)

Now modern customer services has taught us urban survivors a thing or two about self-sufficiency. Place any modern day survivor in the control room of a nuclear reactor steaming towards meltdown with nothing other than the wrong type of spanner and phone labelled ‘customer services’ you know we’ll be down in the reactor core vigorously hammering away at the containment shell like we're auditioning to join the Muppets as Animal's replacement. Really, just anything other than call that number. By dialling, not only are launching yourself onto the cruel seas of misunderstanding, you are also admitting defeat. Now it’t not so bad to reach out for help if it’s you’re standing next to a nuclear reactor that’s boiling like a kettle filled with minestrone soup and is about to turn western Europe’s entire sheep population into an all-conquering army of irradiated Leo Sayers. Less good if you’re missing a screw for your Sukva table and chair set.

Reaching out to customer services is not like asking a grown-up, it’s like asking a grown-up who eats half-gnawed hunks of saliva-sauced KFC out of the bins behind the bus shelter and washes it down with Chateau White Lightening to help your solve quadratic equations.

It has to happen though. Sometimes we’re tossed powerlessly about like a seasick landlubber by events and circumstance. Take the other day as an example. Now, I am connected to the Internets via a tautened length of Victorian-era string, and have my broadband delivered by a company called Pipex. The grand corporate machinations of acquisitions-and-mergers have been turning in the meantime and now Pipex is TalkTalk. Which, I’m sure is utterly super and may the managers of TalkTalk be blessed for their successful acquisition with a magic dog that shits gold bullion, but I just wish they would stop telling me about it, and how absolutely wonderful it be for me. I’m really not as excited about it as they are, babbling away like teenage lovers. Little do they know their relationship won’t stay like that. There’s disillusion, gradual contempt, hate, and thrown crockery somewhere in their future, they just don’t know it yet. And divorce battle of over the magic dog that shits gold bullion will dwarf even that petty scrap at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (you know, 264 hours in).

Now there is one thing about my broadband service that’s important to note: it’s called ‘Pipex Xtreme’ –  which proudly declared itself 'unlimited'. Now had assumed that didn’t mean unlimited Pipexes, delighful though they sound, but rather unlimited broadband. As many bytes as could squeeze through my skinny little phone line, like stuffing an elephant down a snake and then ordering it dessert.

So, when TalkTalk cunningly slip a distinctly not-unlimited 40 GB/month cap into the smaller print of a letter headed “A Small Change to Your Direct Debit” rather than “HA, YOUR BROADBAND IS NOW UN-UNLIMITED, SUCK ON THAT! (Oh and by the way, we’re taking your money and using it to buy our boss a dog that shits gold bullion)” I feel a slight build-up of what is best called grumble magma. Not enough to erupt, but enough to set the green ink needle wobbling on nearby seismographs. It was late at night, so I located the customer services email of Pipex and sent my uncommonly reasoned response to mildly demand that they return my broadband back to its full, unrestrained glory. Now, I’ve only dealt with Pipex’s attempts at customer services once before, and it didn’t disappoint.  Admittedly, I had set my expectations lower the a midget limbo dancer's world record attempt bar. And sadly it was too late to take more effective path of writing the message on a piece of paper, stuffing it in a bottle, and then taking  the train to Southend to fling it from the end of the pier. Instead I was forced to send it thrumming down that piece of antique telecommunications string.

I anticipated a quick and simple solution to my problem...

Surviving Customer Services (Part 1)

Once upon a time, when you needed customer service, you turned up at the business in question, found your way to the special office dedicated to just that, and pinged a bell on counter. One harmonious, self-important moment later someone would pop out of the back office to provide you with the kind of service that a customer could expect. The person behind the counter didn’t pretend that you had suddenly become invisible. He or she didn’t put on a funny accent and claim you weren’t speaking English. They didn’t start screaming at you like you had developed a third eye, horns, a reddish skin complexion and threatened to consume their firstborn children in some blood-curdling demon orgy, when all you had really asked was if you could get a refund on a jar of mouldy raspberry jam.

Of course, this good, solid kind of customer service was magical in that way that things remembered are, untempered by any kind of reality (and as such the world that Daily Mail readers still live in). You forget the wait time that stretched back into the dark ages and you’d be joining behind someone with the black death and that these desks were staffed by pustulant ogres who could burp the stench of Satan’s recently filled shit-can as though they had eaten garlic pickled dead babies for lunch. But these were the good old days when the world was rendered in black and white, slavery was OK, and World Wars were the character-building equivalent of gap years for the nation’s youth. Like it still is for Daily Mail readers.

Times have been a changing though. Firstly, there came the Internet, a magical system of global electronic spaghetti invented by men looking for a viable alternative to buying their porn from the newsagent (usually best sandwiched between two slices of semi-respectable newspapers). And for those who couldn’t reach the heights of the top shelf, the only other option was to spend their time smut-foraging in road-side hedgerows and verges like hungry foxes in search of the pornographic equivalent of a half-eaten Ginster's pasty. It’s no wonder several collective pulsating, febrile tonnes of male brain worked together to achieve such a marvel of modern communications technology.

Despite the humble aims of the internet, it redefined the world as we know it. We can now squeeze our entire lives through a wire, in the same way as forcing an whole pig through an industrial sausage machine produces budget-friendly strings of reprocessed meat products The outside is that place glimpsed over the top of your glowing monitor, somewhere that makes your eyes feel slightly nervous, like middle-aged men caught outside a school at going-home time. It also created an opportunity. A devilishly brilliant opportunity that Satan himself wished he had patented. Outsourcing. Why not farm out your service operations to dim-and-distant places no one had previously heard about, such as Kirkcaldy and Hyderabad, and effectively any other place where the likelihood of your being understood is low-to-negligible. This lack of communication is instantly useful, since they may well be solving your problem or making it worse, you simply can’t possibly know, which reduces your number of avenues for complaint. Of course, you know you’d get the same responses from them if you composed entire sentences solely out of the words ‘pork pie’ and shouted them down the phone, like a madman in Greggs.

Now, in 2011, Apple can invent a phone that understands you. Even if you shout “pork pie” at it, it remains unfazed, and probably gives you directions to Melton Mowbray. It’s a phone that could get more GCSEs than the average schoolchild and can tell the capitals of countries you can’t even spell. Yet customer services provides a working home for a mutual lack of understanding. They don’t understand you. You don’t understand them. And to be fair, they don’t even understand themselves. It’s like everyones caught a virulent brain disease that makes them shout in Klingon at each other for several minutes before the unstoppable urge to munch brains takes over and puts a finally bloody full stop to it all.

To be continued...

Apologies to Kurt Russell

It has been asked whether I planned to spend the rest of my life discussing the pros and cons of London train stations, like some fixated alt-trainspotter. Sadly, even at my current prolific rate of blogging I couldn't fill an entire lifetime of bloggery writing solely about London's train stations. Unless it was a lifetime about to be cruelly curtailed in a freak accident during a research trip to Birmingham New Street.

I'm going to have to write about something else. Plus, let's face it, how much can you write about Marylebone. It's, erm, quite nice and you can buy flowers there. And someone already wrote a Wikipedia page about it. London Victoria, who knows, I'd anticipate standing outside for a while waiting for the bowels of the station to be flushed free of its backlog of commuters. There’s a joke in there about bowels, flushing, and Victoria. I am not making it.

It has also been pointed out that I wrote an entire post entitled 'Escape from Kent' without once making an reference to Kurt Russell. Something to be corrected, I'm sure. As anyone familiar with the Saturday nightlife of Chatham will know, he was quite lucky to find himself banged up in a dystopian, grimy New York and LA, filled with criminal lowlifes and mutants. At least they weren’t being vomited out of a local nightclub after 2am with a full tank of Thump Juice and a ill-recalled sense of grievance. Personally, I’d take sewer mutants any time. You know where you stand with sewer mutants. They’re going to try and eat you regardless of whether you may have looked them funny / looked at their girlfriend funny / looked at their pint funny.

In the spirit of “I’ve started so I’ll finish” I will wearily complete my tour de gare of London with honourable mentions for London Euston, which offers a quicker way to travel back to 1960s than building your own time machine, with fewer visits to Maplins.

London Blackfriars will shortly be the only station with entrances on both sides of the Thames, filling both the niche of train station and the thing we used to once call a bridge in one fell swoop. That’s the future. It’s only a matter of time before they build a Tesco that does the same. Shop as you cross.

If I have forgotten a station, don’t remind me, this subject is done.

Escape from Kent

Trains from Kent are generally uncertain just how far they want to get into London. Some give up at London Bridge. That’s plenty far enough, they say, all change, I am not going any further. It’s dirty. Some bravely forge on and into London Cannon Street. They’ve crossed the mighty Thames and dirtied their wheels on the grim northern shore, dispensing commuters right into the maw of the Bank of England, and then sucking them each evening back to Tunbridge Wells.

Others take a braver turn, straining through the strangled knot of train lives over Borough Market as though they’re been passed by a man with an aversion to dietary fibre. Eventually, they reach Waterloo East or Charing Cross, the latter being the very heart of London, apparently.

Charing Cross, the heart of London, and better known as 'Angry Chas'.

There are two parts of Kent. The close bit which includes places like Sevenoaks which are filled with Pizza Express-fed commuters and the far bit that takes weeks to get to and has its own timezone. Something happens to time and space midway across Kent, and the distance between London Bridge and – for instance – Margate is thereafter measured in hours rather than miles. Margate is so far away it can be safely used as a dump illegal immigrants and spent nuclear waste. It’s quite possible that the Isle of Thanet has floated off to become a province of Belgium and no one recently checked Google Earth.

Why it takes so long to get to bits of Kent

There is a high-speed train line through Kent. Helpfully, it goes from St Pancras, and avoids any accusations of utility by not going anywhere useful in Kent other than France. Ebbsfleet anyone? Even people in Ebbsfleet don’t know where it is. They're lost.

Surviving Waterloo

Napoleon did it, so can you. So the saying ought to go.

Waterloo. Home of the commuter-complainers. These people come from Surrey and Hampshire, lands of green ink-gushing pens and county-sized Waitroses. The result is a green tsunami of complaint about the little things that other Londoners take for granted – like your train turning up on the correct day.

Trains approaching Waterloo appear to have been cleaned in the last decade. They have guards so they may indeed have travelled here from the last decade. It’s oddly civilised being able to sit on a seat without sticking to it in the exudate of someone who might have died and decomposed, or at least was suffering the advanced stages of bath-shyness. Waterloo is, in fact, so civilised that you can’t go there without expecting something really, really bad to happen in karmic recompense. The feeling of imminent doom flaps over you like a giant incontinent pigeon.

This is probably why the commuters who descend on Waterloo feel the need to complain.

Surviving Writing a Blog

Is apparently tougher than it seems.

Surviving Paddington Station

Although the eponymous bear arrived in Paddington from deepest, darkest Peru, no matter how hard you stare at the arrival and departure boards the precise train service from Lima that he must have arrived on will elude you. Trains from Paddington do span all manner of exotic destinations. From the delights of Didcot to the international sights of Swansea. Just not evidently South America. That said, the price of a return ticket to Swindon may leave you feeling as though you have accidentally purchased a business class flight to Patagonia.

There is sadly a darker truth to the story of Paddington. His claim to have arrived on the train was nothing more than a shabby lie designed to cover his true intentions. Paddington, as we now know, entered the country illegally on flight to Heathrow and made his way to central London on the Heathrow Express. It had to be left to one of our most popular newspapers to tenaciously investigate and unearth the truth. Yes, the fearless and peerless Daily Mail came through and delivered that scoop. And it got worse, it turned out that Paddington didn't just come to UK illegally, he was a mule (or rather, bear) for the Peruvian marmalade cartels, carrying a sticky stash of high grade, thick cut orange marmalade under his hat. That’s the real deal. Well, I may have made it up, which is co-incidentally what the Daily Mail does most of the time.

So from Paddington you can go as far as deepest, darkest south Wales, which doesn’t have any remaining bears, just the occasional hirsute Welshman who you may mistake for one. Trains also seek out Bristol and the West Country. West country folk drink cider and talk slowly, facts that probably aren’t entirely unrelated. Some talk so slowly that they are still finishing sentences that begin in the 70s. Generally, they stay away from London, as combine harvesters aren’t an acceptable means of getting around a modern metropolis, nor are they exempt from the congestion charge. Paddington also brings in the people of Berkshire, which given the quirky American-befuddling pronunciation, and presence of the neodynium tourist magnet that is Windsor, sounds quite pleasant. To anyone that hasn’t seen the popular Sky 3 programme Roadwars, that is, or hasn’t been to either Slough or Reading. And if you’ve not been to either, keep it that way.

Surviving Liverpool Street Station

In times of old(e), the first port of call for any warlike and savage foreigners would be the provinces of East Anglia and Essex. These were the Club 18-30 destinations of choice for the Vikings, Jutes, Saxons, and anyone else with a giant helmet, fearsome axe, and a passion for late nights and mead. The tour boats would drop them ashore, and they’d rampage and pillage on through the night before finally slumping in a pool of their own vomit and someone else’s viscera. And they next day (well, afternoon) they’d kick off again, partying like it was 999. Which it probably was.

Once they’d put their youthful exuberances behind them, many stole a holiday home and settled down to a more peaceful life (once they'd killed the original owners, of course). Like modern British retirees in Spain, they never got around to learning the language or the culture, but unlike them, they generally got along through periodic culls of any dissenting locals.

Time has generally worn down the sharp edges of these once fierce invaders. Those in the northern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk devolved into peaceful swamp dwelling creatures that can be safely poked with a stick. Not so, the residents of Essex, their sharp edges remain such. The chariots of their hotblooded youth still roar along the seafront of Valhalla-on-Sea, each a screeching death yell of overheated Corsa; their exotic villas assemble on the broad avenues of Chigwell, built in the style of a six-year-old with blunt crayons.

This marauding tide gushes through the gates of Liverpool Street station each morning and then recedes each evening, leaving a trail of moral wreckage and lukewarm vomit behind. They’re like Vikings without the flashy hats and finely honed moral sensibilities. Fuelled on Stella and a job in the city, they make for a fearsome foe.

Fenchurch Streets also offers services to Valhalla-on-Sea and connecting stations. Generally, this is the safer of the two stations, since very few people know quite where it is, and it gets no easier to find after eight pints of Stella.

Survival tips. Spilling Stella on a lad from Essex on a Friday evening is the equivalent of throwing a Mogwai in the shower after midnight. I know that Billericay sounds like it might be populated by Hobbits. But it’s not, unless they’re ferocious, bitey little hobbits, who have somehow contracted rabies and decided to treat it with PCP. You can’t even fit one in a blender. Unless you have a really big blender. Note that this is illegal and you should not enter Essex with either an oversized blender or this thought in mind. There are far more of them than you and in all probability you won't survive past Shenfield.

Surviving King's Cross

There’s no better place to start our survey of London’s great train termini than the gateways to the North and the Midlands (the Midlands are the undecided bit of the country that everyone regards with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for Frenchmen) – King’s Cross, St Pancras, and Euston.

King’s Cross and St Pancras stations are helpfully sited next to other for no better reason than to confuse the unwary. They merge underground in a devious and unpleasant psychological experiment. Those unfamiliar with the subterranean geography can scuttle around a warren of tunnels like a frantic rodent that’s been force-fed large doses of stimulants. Several hours later, you’ll either find the correct tube line or reach the surface. If you do locate the Northern Line you get a food pellet. Or a very severe electric shock, depending on how clumsy you were at the platform edge.

King’s Cross and Euston act as the gateways to Scotland. As such, if you spend any time (longer than one minute) outside of either you’ll eventually be accosted by a drunk Glaswegian. He’s either insulting your parentage or asking for directions. Linguists, after exhaustive study, have yet to figure out which. It’s not the Scottish accent, believe me absolutely everyone in Scotland talks like Miss Brodie’s slightly posher aunt, it’s the result of a lifetime of being steeped in Buckfast Tonic Wine and the eight cans of Tenant’s Super than enlivened his journey down the spine of the country. He’ll be readily identifiable by the fact he’s wearing a t-shirt whatever the weather and will have a carrier bag (presumably with more industrial-strength lager, but you ask him). He’ll also be followed by several distraught and confused families. They’re not his, they’ve just been confined in the same carriage since Birmingham New Street. Generally, despite standing on the streets of London, he’ll still be of the firm belief that he never left Scotland and the bagpipers have been kidnapped by the English in some weird inversion of the Pied Piper myth. There are sober Scots, they remain in Scotland inventing things like televisions, penicillin, and the macadamised road.

Of course, followed by the Scots, are the people of the North.

Northern people generally don’t like being in London. They will tell this to anyone that will listen. Even if they’ve lived in London for the last thirty years, they’ll still tell you how much they hate London, usually while sipping their cappuccino. The North, of course, has fewer people than sheep and you can leave your doors unlocked at night, mostly so the neighbours in the terraced house next door can come in and steal your TV to buy more drugs without having to kick the door in.

The North is obviously a fantastic place if you like wool and dislike keys. For some though, being Northern just isn’t enough, they have to be from Yorkshire, oddly often referred to as "God’s Own County” despite no evidence that either He or any of his prophets (including the angel Moroni who unaccountably skipped the entire county on his gap year trip to the US) ever visited. By and large, the people of Yorkshire don’t even like being in the North, since it’s contaminated by the filthy red rose-touting non-Yorkshire parts. Even some areas of Yorkshire aren’t Yorkshirey enough for them. “That’s not really Yorkshire,” they’ll disdainfully declare as though you’ve just handed them a turd, “that’s SOUTH Yorkshire.” Truth is though, even if they had located the perfect, unadulterated northern heart of Yorkshire-ness, a confection of whippets and flat caps, the average Yorkshireman would be too tight to pay the bus fare to get there.

Surviving the King’s Cross area has become easier. Eurostar trains now wend their way into St Pancras to add a little bright and be-scarfed continental chic to a once grim, boarded-up slab of London. Now dozens of confused French tourists and Midlanders can mix it up with addled Scotsmen. It’s not unlike a deranged barman (or Tom Cruise) mixing a cocktail of Chateauneuf du Pape, Buckfast, and then adding a splash of dandelion and burdock. Even the area itself has been rebranded Regent Quarter (an uncommon modesty from the developers in not claiming an entire regent), with contemporary lateral living spaces, bars and restaurants displacing the more traditional local attractions of readily available crack cocaine and prostitutes.

Survival tips. Don’t attempt to go underground without a map and ample supplies. Don’t attempt engage the Glaswegian in conversation on the basis that you have read Trainspotting and it can’t be that hard, can it? And for the love of God don’t ask anyone about Yorkshire.

How to Survive Arriving

If we are going to discount the mushroom-in-manure option as the origin of the people of London (which probably wouldn’t even appeal as an explanation to a US school board), then the first place to start with any modern urban survival guide is the process of arriving in the great, smoky metropolis. That difficult birth into the urban sprawl.

When Martians first arrived on Earth, they came in spaceships, and owing to a map-reading error landed in Arizona (of course, every self-respecting alien plans to land in Los Angeles). Spaceships being less of an option for the Earth-bound, we may as well start with a more usual method of arriving.

The train station.

Not all London train stations are created equal. They are called termini for a reason. They’re the cruel, hard lump of punctuation that throws the unsuspecting head-first into the urban metropolis. There’s no air bag and contrarily to the literary view, the streets are more typically paved with dog shit, chewing gum, and comatose drunks than gold. At least they're generally softer than the concrete pavement.

Surviving both arrival and the mere visit of a London train terminus requires an understanding of what you may encounter.

Welcome to the Jungle

London. Home to significantly more people than you could ever count, and the largest urban zone in Europe. It’s quite likely that if you can survive in London, you can survive anywhere that has oxygen and water. Possibly even Slough.

Very few people are born within the traditional dinging distance of the famous Bow Bells. Even if they appointed Motorhead as campanologists-in-chief at St Mary-le-Bow Church to extend the aural catchment area, you’d probably only end up with enough self-declared pearly kings and queens to count on the remaining fingers of a man who still faints at the mention of agricultural machinery. Let’s face it, the population of London is either spontaneously generating like mushrooms in a Victorian manure pile or they come from the mythical lands of Elsewhere. Most of the remaining dwindling population of native Londoners have been caught in recent years by strategically placed Eel and Pie shops. Once trapped, they are taken away and released back into the safe environment known as Walford. It’s genuinely better that way.

No, most Londoner’s come from Elsewhere.