The Graduate: LSE meets Brixton

Heavens. Things really have kicked off this week. It’s a good time to be an ex-LSE student with an ambition to be a journalist, I tell you that. Every journalist I know has been up my arse asking how to get hold of Howard Davies.
Sadly, Howard and I were never exactly on first name or mobile number terms. That said, I don’t think he’d forget my face; being excessively inebriated at the LSE Media Group Awards, handing out awards and spectacularly failing to display any grace, poise or intellect, whilst shouting at a microphone ‘Eh? This winner isn’t even here. They don’t deserve it then!’ wasn’t my finest hour. He saw it all, including my bare arse cheeks.
Although I have lots to write on the matter of Howard’s resignation, I don’t wish to write about it here: namely, because last week I was reminded of the temperament of the LSE student population. It’s taken me a good six months to forget that this is the LSE, where everyone has an opinion about absolutely everything there is to have an opinion about.
LSE is the sort of place that changing the location of a water fountain on campus would spark a debate about Israel/Palestine. (‘No! No! Not on the West side of Natwest Bank!’) Sadly, I had completely forgotten this. Pointing out that everyone at LSE is extortionately opinionated isn’t a criticism just a personal note to myself that jokily remarking on Facebook that Howard Davies is ‘an absolute lad’ has its consequences.  Anyway, whilst the debate rages on and students hold EGM, UGMs, NGMs, etc, I’ve been taking walks in Hampstead Heath with my boyfriend and trying to think of how I can ever afford to live there, and whether I’ll ever drive my 4×4 into Snappy Snaps after smoking too much weed.
I would like to recommend Hampstead as a place to go when you’re fed up with real London. Hampstead is fake, cotton wool London. The Sunday Times wrote recently that North Londoners, the likes of the Islington and Hampstead yuppies, are different from South Londoners in that they have a political conscience. They care about recycling, and other upper middle class stuff like that.
Well that’s probably because, judging by the residences in Hampstead, North Londoners are absolutely minted. Minted enough to worry about stuff like recycling bins et al.  Meanwhile, the black community I’ve spent every bus journey home on the 59 to Streatham with for the past four years, don’t have any money.
The people on the 59 bus all look so miserable sometimes I feel the need to stand up on the bus and shout ‘come on everyone! It’s not that bad!’ Yet I don’t, because I know that in my comfortable upbringing I’ve never know what it’s like to be truly poor, truly desperate and truly worried about money.
A point which was only too clear on Saturday night. After my aspirational jaunt on the Heath on Saturday, I travelled back to my Southern abode and went out in Brixton for a male friend’s birthday. Jokingly this male friend (ex-lover) had written in the invitation to his birthday night out, ‘We’re going to a live venue in Brixton, don’t worry kids it’s not as knifey as it used to be.’
Having lived not far from Brixton for 3 years, I thought I’d be prepared for the general amount of criminal activity Brixton would greet me with. But I wasn’t. On the long walk to the venue I saw two men being mugged/asked for money, eight police riot vans and ambulances blaring past, and two groups of men taunting people.
It wasn’t a fun night because I didn’t feel comfortable. I felt edgy and I couldn’t get drunk. I thought my brother’s mates would all look after me, but I soon realised they weren’t the type of men who would see that sort of  thing as their responsibility.
So at about 2am I ran outside into (what I hoped but couldn’t be 100% sure was) a licensed taxi and went home to bed., and thought about how I should recycle more.