2002-08-22 - 6:33 p.m.

One of, and it�s not stiff competition I�ll tell you that for nothing, the great things about my street is that you can hear about fifteen languages being spoken every time you walk down it. Granted, most of them are being slurred at you from some fetid alcohol-strewn concrete street pit, or hurling mutually unintelligible racial abuse at each other, but there�s great equality and even distribution of that abuse, so no-one feels like a minority.

I stopped in at my local �continental� (meaning they sell Cypriot ketchup and Israeli bog roll instead of nice brands) supermarket whilst wending my merry way back from work to buy fishfood for Freeman, Hardy and Ken (the) Loach, and all kinds of multilingual hullaballo was in evidence. One of the till boys was shouting in his harsh Turkish brogue at a sunglass-toting Rasta who was giving as good as he got in less-than complimentary Jamaican patois. The argument, unable to progress until some degree of linguistic compromise was broached, boiled down to them hollering in broken English about who was the most foreign, the loser seemingly having to �go back where they came from�. I assume they were both from Hackney, so it would presumably only involve a short bus ride, but it was just strange to have two immigrants arguing about who was the most British, when it�s a characteristic that the rest of us spend most of our time trying to cover up.