Where there's a Willesden there's a way

Sunday, October 12, 2003

You wouldn't think it, but...

I slipped on a banana skin yesterday.

I was walking in Kingsbury high street, at which point I nearly felt right over, and was surprised to find I hadn't stepped in dog poo but slipped on a nasty black banana skin.

I saw my first one in the street a few weeks ago and was surprised. Sure, local teenagers walk down the street throwing off a trail of opal fruit wrappers or throwing off all the layers of their cigarettes. You even see half-eaten takeaways just dropped on a saturday morning when the buyer has got bored of them or somehow distracted. And it's messy and disgusting, I know. But dropping a banana skin is something else. We all *know* people slip over on them, even if we've never actually seen it happen. But in cartoons it happens all the time, and the unfortunate tripper will traverse a perfect arc as their feet literally lift off, before gravity calls them down again and they land painfully on their backs. (NB- If it's in a cartoon, this will be accompanied by motion lines).

So when I first saw one just lying in the street, I was genuinely shocked and assumed it was a freaky one-off. Maybe a practical joke, or a gorillagram gone wrong. So I kicked it out of the way, in case some tragi-comic scene be played out behind my back as I walked away.

But since that day, I've been running in to them at least twice a week. So this is more than just an isolated event; this is a trend. Why are people leaving discarded banana skins? Are they going to start wearing shorts and carrying catapults next?

This ties into another theory; my life is ressembling a cartoon at the minute. It's lucky I spend so much time looking at the ground.

But I've never seen anyone walking down the street eating a banana...

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