Bored of excitement – The griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel,

Keith inadvertantly struck a public sector worker in the face with a banana at Greenwich Market on Sunday. If you’re reading this outside the UK, the public sector is a thing which either employs three people to do one person’s job, or one person to do three people’s jobs, and whose main role in wider society is to provide secure employment for terminally but non-specifically unhappy women. It’s cats, yoghurts, and crying at desks, basically, and we quickly knew that this woman was a public sector employee because she said ‘I’m a social worker, you know’ a bit angrily, and is probably just settling in to a couple of years off work with depression as I write.

In case you aren’t aware of who Keith is, he sells photographic art in our section of the market, and if a picture of him in shorts in the ’80s is to be believed, is eight inches on the slack. The catalyst between the public sector worker, the trouser proud photography vendor and the accidental fruity missile is Danny, who sells jewellery opposite my usual pitch. When bored, Danny will throw leftover foodstuffs onto the top of Keith’s stall, in order to attract pidgeons who, if everything goes to plan, will relieve themselves all over Keith’s stuff. It’s a remarkably successful ploy, and never one to be outdone, I’m thinking of putting a meadow in the market roof, to see if it works with cows.

Anyway. Danny had placed the banana above Keith’s stall some hours earlier, and it was by the magic of failing to hit Danny when he lobbed it back that Keith hit the social worker instead. It’s always a shame when a civilian gets caught up in bored market traders trying to piss each other off for a larf, but that’s the way it goes in the ghetto. Anyone who’s been here for a very long time will recall the Great East Yard Fued at Camden in the summer of 2008, which saw me largely engaged in distracting Pikey Dave long enough to set fire to items on his stall in response to having all my storage boxes floated out onto the Grand Union Canal with my stock in them. I was reminded of all this on a recent visit to Camden, when Dave pulled me over and said ‘Yeah those Hello Kitty handbags I had the other year. I sold a load to Irish Bill a couple of weeks ago, and now he’s getting grief from punters because in every single bag someone’s put a sheet of A4 paper which has a big cock with all spunk coming out of the end drawn on it. Did you do that?‘  I said no, because I felt that it was probably a good moment to do a bit of lying.

Twitter: Superfluous social networking site for bored people.

Facebook: No change this week, so we remain on a nice round 117 members.