Monday, December 31, 2007

Christians redux

A couple of days ago I was, as I do, hanging around outside Westminster Cathedral in Victoria.

Victoria is home, of course, to London's main coach station and anyone who has had cause to use the station at any point over the last few years will have been greeted by the sight of dozens of coaches, queued nose to tail, waiting to unload their cargoes of thousands of people from Eastern Europe looking to find out for themselves if the streets of this unfair city truly are paved with gold.

Most of them, even though they soon discover that gold is pretty thin on the ground these days, move on and manage to get by. But a few don't and soon discover that a Plan for a Better Life which simply involves the following steps...

1. Get on a coach to London
2. There is no Step 2

...does have certain limitations

To cut a long story short, there are always quite a few people sleeping rough in and around Victoria. In fairness to the local council and various charities, they do get help but there are always more people taking their place

Anyway, I was standing by the 'Catholic Truth' bookshop next to Westminster Cathedral admiring its nativity scene and its fine selection of divinely-inspired cookbooks


The Whited Sepulchre bookshop, Victoria


when I noticed an interesting wee sign conveniently located at gutter level on the front door...





Not being a linguist I can only guess that the writing on the right hand side of that sign on the front door of an allegedly Christian bookshop is telling people who are down on their luck and reduced to sleeping on pavements to fuck off in four different languages



.

5 comments:

Merkin said...

'No Sleeping HERE' in Polish is Karol Wotyla's legacy in the top one.

Stef said...

oh the fucking irony

Anonymous said...

Of course, if only those street people had read "successful living" type books inside the bookshop then they wouldn't be in that situation.

As Jesus would say "They only have themselves to blame".

Anonymous said...

Shop asthetics and convenience to punters comes before social problems. Hummm.

Welcome to the modern age.

Putz said...

sleeping is my very favorite thing, especially when my neighbors turn me into the police because my dog were barking tooloud at their loud new year eve parties..go figure...my new uear's resoulution {i wasn't going to have one, but here goes} DO NOT EVER TALK TO THE NEIGHBORS IN 08