You are now entering free London

In these times of austerity and food banks, important questions are being raised. Is it possible to survive off the free food samples in Selfridges Food Hall?

It was a wet morning in October when I stepped of the number 73 bus at the west end of Oxford Street. The tip of my umbrella scraped along the pavement and I was forced to abandon it in a recycling bin. I removed my hat as I pushed against the huge brass doors of the department store. I was in the perfumery section. Already, I could smell well for free.

I walked towards the food past the huge 'chocolate library' where hundreds of bars of the sweet stuff are displayed. Purely in the interests of research, I was to discover whether it was possible to survive off the free food samples in Selfridges for a week. In present circumstances, what experiment could be more natural?

Selfridges Food Hall consists of several hexagonal counters in white and glass providing food from around the world. I hover by one selling Mediterranean sweets and a young woman walks past with a tray of miniature tubs of frozen yoghurt. Before I can say don't mind if I do, I have snaffled two of the tiny buckets. It is breakfast or possibly lunch and it is gratis.

A moment later, I am dipping artisan bread in bespoke olive oil. Who cares what's going on outside? I'm in Selfridges and it's free.

Alright, after one too many mouthfuls of rose-scented Turkish delight, I am asked to leave, but my quest doesn't end there. This is London, one of the greatest metropolises on Earth, and its cornucopia of good things simply overflows.

I have heard that religious folk feed the hungry in Lincoln's Inn Fields for nada and my feet clip-clop eastwards one after the other. I appear, purely for my investigations. Here are the down and outs, the unfortunate immigrants and maybe the feckless. A choice of religions is feeding the hungry. Word goes around that the Hari Krishnas are the best. They hand out a reliable curry. The Hindus give out bags of crisps and chocolate. Unfortunately, the Christians are doling out a tasteless stew and force the helpless to listen to a man on a guitar.

But Free London doesn't end there. I make my way to Regent's Park where I discover I can, by standing in the right places, view animals for free in London Zoo. So far I've spied a hyena and a wallaby.

And so, my experiment is at an end and I must go as I've heard a bunch of Scientologists is giving out free Twixes in Walthamstow. 

Square to be hip

Of all London bus routes, number 4 is the craziest, at least towards its end. Starting at Waterloo, it goes past the Aldwych law courts over Ludgate Hill towards St. Paul's. Then it bends round to Barbican and onto Angel. At Highbury Corner, it deviates wildly to Highbury Barn and Finsbury Park. Any tourist reading its advertised destination of Archway would be disappointed to find it then travels at a right-angle to Tufnell Park and towards Dartmouth Park Hill. The bus terminates at MacDonald Road in Archway. Coincidentally, there is a McDonald's on the corner.

So began my interest in the number 4. There are four points on the compass, four elements and no other number has such interesting angles. I am the third of my mother's four children.

But as for coincidence, what is it? I would have to say it was two events that appear meaningfully connected, but this connection cannot be proved. Say, for example, that the barcode on the chocolate bar you just bought turns out to be your phone number. Highly unlikely, but equally unlikely that Cadbury's are messing with your head.

One day I set out in search of the number four. The sky was clear except for the trails of the aeroplanes and the air was clear and as crisp as an apple from the tree. I took the number 4 as far south as it would take me and went west to, where else, Trafalgar Square. All London distances are measured from this point and I remembered the black and white tiles up the steps outside the National Gallery.

Standing on this chequered point, I bumped into a man who could only be known as the Cube (and also the Rock, the Red Pepper and Pythagoras).

The Cube worked behind the scenes at a West End theatre, raising and lowering the scenery. Recently, he had moved into film, choreographing large scale special effects. I had once stopped the Cube from getting into a fight with a criminal type and he grudgingly owed me a favour, which usually took the form of advice.

When I told him about my interest in the number four, he shook his head and asked if I had covered all the angles. He then reminded me that a cube has six sides. No dice, he said and walked off down the steps between the fountains.

I realised then I was not far from that other shape, Leicester Square, and made my way there. Here the open corners of the streets feeding into the entertainment more resemble a Catherine Wheel. I decided to concentrate on more serious squares: Brunswick, Mecklenburgh and Tavistock squares.

I wish I could share with you all the points of my research but I cut a lot of corners and did not take enough notes on my graph-lined notepaper. My feet blistered as I walked the streets of London. I was ridiculed, openly laughed at and even called a square.

To be honest, things went really wrong for me when I discovered the straight lines of Finsbury Circus.

The Beard Law

It was in 1998 that I first heard about the Beard Law. I was sitting in The Boat Race pub in Cambridge when I was approached by an elderly man in a flat cap. He had an enormous beard.

He was wearing a white raincoat and smelled strongly of Old Holborn. Sitting on a seat beside me, he offered legal advice on a pro bono basis. Our masters in Parliament were about to ban all beards. This was the Beard Law.

Any time soon, after the third reading in the House of Lords, the bill was to receive royal assent. Beards would disappear from Britain. Sales of razors would boom. The bottom would fall out of the moustache wax market.

I asked my companion what he would do. His eyes filled with tears as his facial hair tickled the brim of his pint glass.

Something had to be done. My mind raced through the obvious options: write to my MP or march through Westminster. At the very least, I could buy shares in shaving foam.

I decided to go to the university library to research the subject. Beards had been in and out of favour since ancient times being alternately seen as evidence of heroism or uncouthness. In 1698, Peter the Great of Russia had passed a law banning beards from his subjects. The Beard Law had a precedent. I had something to tell the Beard Law man.

I next saw him in the street near where he lived. It was spring now and he still wore his white macintosh and hat. He updated me on the Beard Law's passage through the committee stage and the threat to our liberties. He was not surprised that the Russians had banned beards.

I decided to move to London and grow a beard. No young men had beards then, except for some religious folk. 

The most asked question to a beard wearer is how did they grow it. To which the answer is, it just grew out of their face.

After some time, the beard had to go. It was not I had made a decision as to its nobility or churlishness. It was simply that the beard was ginger.

Over the years, things went quiet. I was not in touch with the Fenland beard man and I noticed a distinct absence of news reports about the law's enactment. Then a strange thing happened. Everyone began to grow a beard and beards were everywhere. From Hoxton to Highgate and down to Ladbroke Grove, men sprouted as many bristly hairs as befitted their noble or barbarian blood. A man rode past me on a bicycle looking like Edward Lear. You could be served in a pub by Ernest Hemmingway or Santa Claus.

I met my friend for lunch at the House of Commons where she worked. A familiar figure caught my eye in the lobby. At first I was unable to place him. It was Mr. Beard Law in his old cream coloured coat, but he was completely clean shaven. Noticing my surprise, he told me that he had switched sides and decided to campaign for the Beard Law. He told me he had received some funding from a well-known maker of disposable razors to pay for his travel to London. 

In this time of mustachios and beard stroking, now, more than ever, we really need the Beard Law.

How I became very important

London: city of importance and important people. It was at the end of the last century that I realised I might not be important enough in the city of my birth. It was then that I saw a small card displayed in my local supermarket. It said:

FEEL IMPORTANT

THE SOCIETY OF IMPORTANT PEOPLE MEETS MONTHLY

I checked the date and they were meeting the next day a few miles from me. I was free that evening, as unimportant people often are, and I made my way down the broken streets to the venue.

When I walked into the brightly lit room, there were about nine or ten people sitting in a circle. One of them rose to meet me. He told me his name was Clive and he was the leader of the group. Before this he had not been an important person.

"Congratulations on becoming to become important."

The evening unfolded and soon it became clear that, while some group members felt more important than others, everyone had gained a functioning level of self-worth from the group. I ended up volunteering to look after the keys to the room we met in. As I walked back home, I clutched the cold metal in my pocket. I was now an important person, to at least ten people.

The next day, I woke early and soon set to work on how my fellow members of the society could feel more important. The internet was just beginning back then and I came up with a scheme where each member of the group could have their own web page onto which pictures could be easily added. The group members liked the idea and I soon worked out a way to send messages between pages. It was the year 2000 and I had invented Facebook. I was now a very important person although I did not realise it yet.

The group continued to meet above Frequent Fryers Fried Chicken in Bow and, through use of the website, our residual sense of our own importance began to grow. Soon we were swapping photographs and exchanging messages like it was 2009. Once again, it was only the year 2000 and Mark Zuckerberg was probably playing Pokemon somewhere near New York.

Clive had starting wearing cravats and driving a red car. Another group member had got a promotion at work and was considering standing as a school governor. Everyone was generally feeling very important.

It was time for the next step. Our new found sense of importance had to be expressed and we had to let the world know we really mattered now. I came up with the idea or maybe Clive. We were to hire the Conway Hall and give a public lecture. It would be written by the group but delivered by only one of us. After a show of hands, I was chosen. The lecture was to be given the next month. I started to feel really important.

As the day of the lecture approached, the excitement in the group could be felt. We left confidence boosting messages on each other's web pages and I am sure we also used to send each other amusing pictures of cats as well. The title of the lecture was to be, ominously, "The Importance of Being ..."

The day arrived. Clive drove up outside the Conway Hall in his red car. I showed up clutching a paper folder of notes. The lecture went well although the audience contained only the group itself and a couple of strangers. At the end of the evening Clive made a big announcement. He said that the group was now going to dissolve as it had achieved its goal. I was shocked but accepted it.

I was back on my own again, but this time with a slowly diminishing sense of importance. I took to pacing around my home and then the streets around it. One evening, about three months after the lecture, I walked past the original place for our meetings. I could see a faint glow from the top of the building. I let myself in, walked up the stairs and opened the door. To my horror, there was the Society of Important People meeting as normal. By now everyone's sense of self-worth was so high that some were wearing expensive suits and had grown beards.

I demanded an explanation. Clive had sold the Facebook idea to, well, probably Facebook and one of the conditions had been that I would leave the group and be written out of its records.

I was outraged but secretly thrilled. I was now a more important person than I could ever have hoped to have been and I gratefully closed the door, went down the steps and made my way home.

How I hit the big time in little China

It was bad news for Barclays when the bicycle hire scheme they had sponsored in London became rebranded and known as Boris bikes, with the minimal effort on Boris's part. It was a spring afternoon a couple of years ago when I decided on a whim to try one out in Westminster near the Houses of Parliament.

No sooner had I paid for the bicycle and  unlocked it than I was approached by a Chinese man in a white t-shirt. Behind him there where several other men, one with a large camera. They explained that they wanted to interview me for Chinese TV. I agreed.

The man produced a fluffy microphone and asked me several questions such as how often I used these bikes and where I was going to. Then they wanted to film me riding off on the bike. I did so and waved jauntily to a potential audience of over a billion men, women and children.

I headed off down Great College Street towards the choir school. I had not ridden a bike for several years and was a little wobbly on it trying to balance my bag. I was not sure where I was going or where the next bike drop-off point was. I looked over my shoulder at the lights and saw another person on a Boris bike behind me, coincidentally Chinese and not one of the men I had met earlier. I thought nothing more of it.

The days passed. The early promise of spring receded into cold and wet days. I was to meet my friend for a birthday party in Chinatown. I walked down a damp Shaftesbury Avenue and onto Gerrard Place. Glazed poultry hung in the windows of the restaurant. I turned the handle and walked in.

Instantly, I was met with looks of recognition by the waiters as if I was their most valued customer and I imagined I heard the phrase 'Boris bike' project from somewhere in the room. The meal passed uneventfully, although the waiters did seem to be unusually attentive.

It was only when I had paid my part of the bill and went to leave that I was approached by a small man in a suit, who I recognised as the cyclist behind me on that promising spring day. He proffered a business card, explained he was an entertainment agent and that I had made the big time in China.

The clip of me on the bicycle, first shown on the tea-time news in China, had achieved cult status from Chengdu to Chongqing. The image of myself slowly waving as I rode off into Westminster had touched a nerve of deep hilarity in the People's Republic. The man explained there were t-shirts, branded tea-sets and possible guest appearances to be made. Boris Bike Man was huge in the East and I needed people on the ground to mediate for me.

I walked home clutching the edges of the business card in my pocket. The next morning I rang its mobile number. My first engagement was in front of a large blue screen in Docklands. They had acquired an outsize version of a Boris bike on which I had to ride while a number of backgrounds were digitally created on the screen behind. I also wore a t-shirt that said Boris Bike Man. After going round in circles for a while, I was always lovingly filmed waving slowly at the camera.

Mr. Wui-Lei, the agent, explained that I was to be paid in something called Bitcoin. After a few days, I received some bad news, however. The Chinese government was blocking searches for Boris Bike Man on Google and was confiscating my earnings for use in their space programme. As I lay on my bed in my small room, I could see the moon through the window. This was to be used by the Chinese as a base on their eventual destination of Mars. I imagined my pedalling motions powering their rockets for a few metres along their way. Having failed to make it in the city of my birth, I had briefly fancied I had conquered Cathay. And, let's face it, you're no-one until you've made it in China.

The phone rang. It was Mr. Wui-Lei. He wanted to know if I was interested in an alternative business opportunity involving electronic cigarettes. I politely declined. After one Chinese banquet, I did not immediately want another one.

Going somewhere?

The time has come to tell the world about my career as a travel journalist.

It was the year 2000 and I was living in the east end of London. As I lay on my bed looking at the peeling ceiling, I glanced right to my atlas map on the wall. Here was the great globe laid flat and I had visited so few of these multicoloured countries. I was seized with an uncontrollable urge to travel to places for free, sit in uncomfortable hotel bars and then come back and make people envious. I wanted to see the world and not just Whitechapel!

I was between jobs at the time and my daily routine had become one of hopeless drudgery. I would email my CV to random recruitment consultants and have desultory conversations with them over the phone. One male voice on the other end of the line would try to elicit confessions from me that I was not seriously looking for work and I would never be a bonus for him. Another would come up with wildly improbable suggestions that I should be a taxi driver or taxidermist.

And then the call came. I was summoned to a small room near Liverpool Street one Tuesday morning. I was then led into a even smaller room where I sat opposite an attractive young woman wearing glasses and holding a clipboard. She explained that I was to be put forward for a position as a travel journalist. There were stipulations, however. First, I had to surrender my passport. She explained that this was to ensure I was not poached by a rival agency during the recruitment process and that I would get it back when I needed to go somewhere. Secondly, there were some odd conditions attached to my meeting my potential employer, a Mr. Maciej.

I was to meet Mr. Maciej in a bar near Embankment tube station but on no account was I to let on that I was there to see him. Instead I was to strike up a random conversation with him which would eventually lead to him offering me a job. I was given a grainy photograph of Mr. Maciej for this purpose.

I arrived at the selected venue at about seven in the evening wearing a dark suit and recently polished shoes. A man was at the bar resembling Mr. Maciej. I walked up to him and said good evening.

"Do I know you?" said Mr. Maciej. I explained we had not met before and asked if he could recommend a red wine. Mr. Maciej said that he did not know who I was and that, if I continued to annoy him, he would have me thrown out by the bar manager who he was on very good terms with.

Embarrassed, I walked towards the door only to feel a light touch on my elbow as I grasped the handle. I turned round. It was Mr. Maciej. He asked me if I would like to be a travel journalist.

My first assignment did not seem to offer much travel. I was to approach members of the public and, opening with the simple question of "going somewhere?", record their responses.

I began my investigation at Euston station. I would say about forty per cent of people gave me a reply. The rest just looked alarmed and walked away. The first few responses were simple enough: Birmingham or Crewe. One man told me he had just arrived in London and he had nowhere to go. One woman said she was late for a funeral and did I know the best way to Golders Green.

Things became more interesting when I moved outside the station towards Marks and Spencers. I approached a small, dark man with a moustache. He froze in terror when he heard my opening gambit. I later recognised the man from the newspapers. I had inadvertedly apprehended a wanted criminal. Thinking the game up, the man went meekly with two policemen who happened to be passing.

Soon I had been handed my passport back and I was on the run. Now I was travelling the world for real to avoid the notorious crook and his cronies I had offended. Ah, the countries and places I saw: the streets of Paris, the byways of Italy and the budget hotels of some uncertain central European country. Unfortunately, I was unable to file any reports back to London for fear of disclosing my location.

Become a travel journalist and see the world. That is what they tell young people or at least they say it to themselves. Who is ever compromised by getting things for free? Thanks to the internet, there are now a million people asking the questions for nothing and not even necessarily travelling as they are already there. Once the combination of travel and journalist was a heady mix of noble intentions and getting something for nothing. Now I prefer to research potential destinations in the local library, take out some books and then lie on my bed looking at the ceiling, which has increasingly come to ressemble a map of the globe.

On the origin of Kinder Eggs

I have decided to share my research as to how Kinder Eggs are created. For me, it all began as a child when I was on friendly terms with a girl whose parents owned a sweet shop. The little girl was called Olga and she had the most extensive collection of Kinder Egg toys I had ever seen or have ever yet to see. Her collection even rivalled my own which I built up in my 30s, purely in my investigations.

In those days, Kinder Eggs were a miracle of reverse engineering. Whereas today many toys are already born fully assembled or only require three or four steps to complete, in the early 1980s they were quite different. Kinder Egg toys of over thirty years ago were intricate combinations of many parts and this meant that the completed item was often much larger than the egg itself.

World War One planes, red tractors and miniature architectural fantasies proudly lined the shelves of Olga's shop. To step into this world was to dispense with the question of what was inside these eggs. They had all been opened already.

The shop was down a country lane and it took me about fifteen minutes to reach it from where I was staying in my school holidays. Reader, one day Olga gave me her entire collection of Kinder Egg toys shortly before I was to depart back to London .

Armed with this wonderful gift, I was able to begin my researches into the origins of Kinder Eggs. On the train and boat home, I laid out the not-so-tiny models on any surface I could find: luminous soldiers, incredible monsters and fanciful representations of farmyard animals. Bizarrely, I was not assembling these plastic treasures, but avoiding taking them apart for fear of not being able to put them back together.

What committee of deranged and exact engineers had drawn up these designs. Would I ever know?

The years passed and, if anything, my collection shrunk. How could I justify the purchase of these creations as I entered my teenage years? My twenties only justified their acquisition in fitful bursts of nostalgia.

Then the day arrived. A few years ago, Kinder ran a competition. The prize was a trip to the center of chocolate creativity, probably somewhere in Germany. I immediately bought ten thousand eggs. This was an opportunity not to be missed.

By now the Kinder Toy had evolved to a solid lump. Maybe a brightly painted hippo or three-toed sloth. The corner of my room in central London began to grow into a huge pyramid of them. I regularly brought out bags of recycling containing only white and orange silver foil or yellow plastic pods. I became known as the egg man of Kings Cross.

Where was the winning ticket? I began to accept that I may never have purchased it.

And then, I will remember the toy for ever, there it was contained along with a wildly anthropomorphised mouse or rat. I was soon on my way to Bremen or Bruges.

Only I never made it this far. At the airport I was met by a man in dark glasses, whose own features had the mark of a Kinder creation. We drove silently to a warehouse in Bromley. The interior air had a sickly sweet smell and I was a led to a round table which was large enough but dwarfed in the cavernous surroundings it found itself in.

Around the table sat a collection of what I can only describe as geniuses. The first genius would say a word such as cat or alligator. The next would say "a cat in an orange jumper" or some such. The next would pause and reflect and then say "the same cat, but on a skateboard". And so it would go on, long into the afternoon.

I wish I could tell you all the wondrous things I heard and saw that day, but the terms and conditions of the competition forbid it. Suffice to say, we are all in very good hands with Kinder and no organisation could be more trusted with the design and execution of what can be made to fit inside small chocolate eggs.

My experiences freed me of the compulsion to purchase Kinder Eggs, but recently they have been selling two for a pound in Tescos. It was a cold and unforgiving night. The orange light from the street lamps reflected back off the road. I got a duck-billed platypus and a sports car. Only miniature ones of course, although with the money I have spent on Kinder Eggs, I could have bought both by now. In my mind's eye, I still travel down the country lane to the sweet shop where the philosophy of wonder could not have come to a kinder beginning.

Develop your own personal mythology

Not sure what you believe in anymore? Maybe you are, but it's a real drag convincing others. Don't worry, the natural and inanimate worlds are here to help.

Developing your own personal mythology is a good way to regain your own footing in the worlds around you. Simply fix on something that interests you and that appears meaningful in some undefined way. As an example, I once kept seeing urban foxes everywhere and their appearance would often seem symbolic in some magic imaginary way that I was unable to imagine. What was important was the magic feeling which could now be triggered by the mere word fox or crucially their graphic representation in the culture around me. Oh look a fox! That means something! What does it mean? I don't know! Isn't it brilliant?

Of course, there are limits to this thinking. Soon you will notice that what you have selected is indeed everywhere in a mad scramble by popular and high culture to occupy the empty space you selected. You might even become tired of what you once loved so much. Then it's time to move on to the next thing. But just wait until you see a picture of the fox with the new thing maybe on an underground poster or zooming past you on a bus.

This is an example of constellatory thinking. Your thoughts are like stars in the sky and it's not up to you to see the connections between them although soon you will notice shapes and patterns. It's all working up to the moment a giant graphic of a fox flies past in the sky when you most needed help or reassurance.

And what new thing have I moved on to? For me, it's whales. I predict they are going to be really big this year.

Staircase to heaven

Not long after dawn, an orange light shines on the end of the street. A group of five pigeons walk in circles around some puddles of water and, to the north, the dark clouds are heavily contrasted against the clear skies to the east and south. I am heading down towards the famous talking lifts of Caledonian Road.

This station is misleadingly named. Unusually, it does not deposit you at the start of the street it is named after but instead right in the middle of a waste land of bridges and faceless student housing. There is the now universal tiny Tescos unceremoniously competing with the local shop that is open later. For this privilege of universal access to milk, the locals pay an onerous toll.

There is a Chinese takeaway and a couple of coffee shops offering custard tarts with bitter espressos. To the left is the fascinating North Road which combines an ornate clock and new build with the prosaic ambience of an industrial estate. But it is to the speaking elevators of the underground station that people come.

There are two lifts inside the station and it is advisable to take them rather than the many steps. Caledonian Road is one of the few stations that has classical music piped into them all day (another is Turnpike Lane - also on the Piccadilly line). An automatic voice says which of the two lifts will arrive next.

Crucially, when it is the lift on the left that will arrive first, the voice says "the lift on the left shall be the next lift". When it is the lift on the right, it says "the lift on the right will be".

Shall and will. Who will still enforce these subtle predictors of mood? In the third person, "will" is a simple prediction about the future, but "shall" invokes an element of intention, and well, will. For the lift's mind to be split shall/will enables one to even be talking about the lift's mind and indeed implies a level of sentience on the speaking voice's part for there is one lift it/she has gained control of and one lift which has been lost control of or has never been controlled.

Come to the empty box of Caledonian Road underground station. It is good to alight or depart here. Listen to the speaking voice of the opening and closing doors. In years to come you may look back on this place as the place where the split mind of technology became manifest.