Shit Holidays Newsletter #4
London
Welcome to another edition of the Holidays part of Furphy & Rissole’s Shit Towns & Holidays newsletter. This week, we go all in on London.
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London
Samuel Johnson famously said ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,’ which is ironic because most people in London seem exhausted by the prospect of continued existence. Londoners spend most of their lives crammed into ‘the Tube’, refusing to make eye contact with strangers or feign human emotion and subsisting on a diet of Pret a Manger Chicken Caesars. When they aren’t slaving away in a cubicle farm, they spend long hours in the pub working on their drinking problems to avoid returning to the crippling loneliness of their shoebox flats. In London, clinical depression is a way of life.
Smothered by an oppressive class system, Londoners revel in throwing elaborate parties for the Royal Family and ogling the obscene wealth accumulated by their shapeshifting reptilian overlords while covering up any sexual indiscretions they might have committed. Residents celebrate their love for the Royals by hawking a staggering array of ‘souvenirs’ to unsuspecting tourists including fridge magnets, postcards and even Prince Philip’s dictionary of racist epithets.
Visitors to London who can’t handle the Tube are forced to deal with toothless Cockney cabbies who all think they are making a cameo in a Guy Ritchie film, telling inane anecdotes filled with impenetrable slang in order to distract you from the fact they’ve charged you forty quid for a five-minute taxi ride. If getting around weren’t already hard enough, locals also enjoy deliberately mispronouncing place names such as Thames, Southwark and Holborn in order to confuse tourists.
Another London lowlight is the ‘cuisine’, the sort of medieval fare that revolves around wrapping unidentifiable entrails in soggy pastry and is guaranteed to give you botulism. Pretentious gastropubs shill traditional English ‘classics’ such as spotted dick, Scotch eggs and Cleveland steamers to gullible tourists, many of whom are completely oblivious to the fact that the dishes are not intended for human consumption. If you want something decent to eat, try sampling something from one of the many, many nations that Britain colonised - it’s almost certain to be more edible than anything invented by a Pom.
Other than most of its restaurants, London’s most tasteless tourist attraction is the Jack the Ripper walking tour, where obese Americans get ripped off to follow in the bloody footsteps of a Victorian maniac notorious for mutilating prostitutes. Marvel at the boarding house turned KFC where Jack the Ripper removed Mary Kelly’s breasts! It’s a bit like if Sydney opened an Ivan Milat shooting gallery or if Milwaukee had a chain of Jeffrey Dahmer themed buffets. Other London attractions based on people being tortured throughout the years include the Tower of London, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Emirates Stadium.
Eye-wateringly expensive, utterly pretentious, bisected by a giant river of diarrhoea and featuring a drab combination of a tombstone-like skyline against cement-grey skies, London is like New York except the muggers say thank you after stabbing you for your wallet.
London Facts
Population: 9 million.
Founded: 47 A.D.
Currency: British pound, crumpets, manners.
Language: English, Cockney, Chav.
Demonym: Londonese.
Also known as: London Town, the Big Smog.
As seen in: Mary Poppins, in which an upper-class drug addict holds a family hostage while subjecting them to psychedelic experiments involving gangs of violent working-class sorts.
Most famous resident: Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, the world’s wealthiest dole bludger.
Did you know? Native to London’s East End, Cockney rhyming slang involves replacing words with other words that rhyme for no apparent reason. For example, in Hackney, you can pay someone a Caitlyn Jenner to Donald Duck your Chris Rock.
Top 10 Things to Do in London
Get befuddled at Tate Modern
Fart in a pod on the London Eye
Witness an execution at the Tower of London
Fondle a royal swan
Shit in a palace guard’s big fluffy hat
Make love to Big Ben
Watch Arsenal lose
Get beaten up by a football hooligan
Get run over by a double-decker bus
Visit the British Museum to see all the best things Britain nicked from all the countries they invaded
The Aussie & Kiwi’s Guide to London
Aussies and Kiwis famously love punishing themselves by living in London for a year or two for no apparent reason. If you’re about to embark on a crappy gap year, here are our top ten handy tips to get you through the ordeal until you can scrounge up enough pounds for a plane fare home.
When you get to the other side of the world, make the most of the opportunity by living in a share house in Shepherd’s Bush with 17 people you went to high school with.
Make sure to maintain a balanced diet of tinned baked beans, instant noodles and copious amounts of beer.
If you are looking for the famous Shepherd’s Bush bar The Walkabout, a longtime favourite location for pissed Aussies to chunder up snakebites and commit low-level sexual assaults, you will be walking about for a while - it’s closed.
The once notorious expat nightclub The Church has also closed down, so you will have to play your debaucherous drinking games in an actual church. On the plus side: free wine.
It is perfectly acceptable to fall asleep on the Tube at 6:30 a.m. in an All Blacks jersey because you got up early to go to the pub and watch the game.
London’s proximity to Europe means you can go on a minibreak to Amsterdam or Prague to enjoy all the ‘culture’, and then be prescribed a course of antibiotics to deal with the overdose of ‘culture’ that makes it sting when you pee.
You will probably develop a massive cocaine habit because the nose beers are so cheap they are practically free compared to back home.
Help ward off homesickness by hoarding Aussie and Kiwi foodstuffs that represent a tenuous link to home. Ironically, you will treat Tim Tams like cocaine and cocaine like Tim Tams.
Whether you’re an Aussie or a Kiwi, your respective national day is a sacred date reserved for embarrassing your nation on the world stage. The traditional way to mark Australia Day in London is with a massive pub crawl complete with public urination and several arrests. Waitangi Day is marked in the same way, plus a dodgy haka performed by a crowd of shitfaced shirtless private school boys.
Most importantly, remember: your overbearing parents are on the other side of the world, so you can do whatever you want with absolutely no consequences!
London: Where even summer is so cold the locals have to drink warm beer to prevent frost bite.
Love it. Dodgy haka performed by a crowd of shitfaced shirtless private school boys!!!!