The café owner was chatting to a regular customer who was on a break from promoting his book. The regular asked if he could put a poster in the window. ‘Sure! No problem,’ the owner replied.
The regular produced one of his posters. The book was about Nazism and Hitler’s face loomed large from the A4 sheet. The owner went pale.
‘Look at the condensation in that window,’ he said. ‘We have real trouble with that. Could you could get it laminated and bring it back?’
I looked at the other posters in the window. None of them were laminated.
The Olympic Spirit
The Olympic torch was carried by the local milkman. The customers that he rarely sees lined the streets to cheer him on.
Ahead of him there were floats and lorries from Coca-Cola, Lloyds Bank, Samsung and McDonalds. Big screens showed adverts and people handed out flags with company logos on. When our milkman ran past, it was difficult to see him behind the squadron of bodyguards dressed in uniform grey running gear.
In the middle of that there might have been something good, something capable of bringing people together, but it was utterly lost behind the corporate sponsorship and security.
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