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2004-06-18 - 4:32 p.m.

My name is Pablo and I have a phobia of meeting buskers that I know. Luckily, this particular fear doesn�t impinge much on my day to day life, and I can go about my business in a relatively worry-free manner. Busking strangers, in fact, I find most enjoyable. However, there is the odd episode, and it�s hard to imagine a situation, outside of professing sexual attraction to a blood relative, so fraught with social awkwardness.

My phobia began when I employed a busker called Joe with his own studio to do the soundtrack to a short film that I made. It all went well, and we parted on good terms. I thought nothing much of him, but one day I got a new job and his pitch was on my tube route.

The first time I approached him, he was banging out showtunes on a souped up keyboard. As we saw each other, I smiled and mouthed hello, making to walk past, but Joe downed organ and started to chat. It was good to catch up, but the whole time my mind was on the now tuneless corridor, and how many coins were remaining in pockets that could have been finding their way into his upturned cap. It worried me, that I was eating away at his income, and I cut the conversation short so that he could start wowing the commuters again. The days passed, and each time I would say hello, and Joe would stop, and I would cut the conversation shorter. It was out of consideration for his livelihood, but was causing anxiety no matter how I played it � either I cut him dead after saying hi, or stood there talking to him whilst feeling that I was wrenching the very food out of his mouth. In the end, I took to finding an alternative route to my platform, which thankfully only involved a lengthy detour, several extra escalators and a brisk walk around the perimeter of the building.

No foundation for phobia, you would think. Then came the blind Polish psychologists.

Albert and Mario came to England, so they said, to escape national service, the fact that they were both blind only serving to add to their mystery. When I met them, they were both playing bongos at a house party to whatever came onto the stereo, both incredibly stoned and never missing a beat.

After being caught playing with one of their telescopic white canes, which I was quite enthralled by for some time, I began to talk to them and learned that aside from them both being blind, Polish bongo players, they were both trained psychologists. I worked out the odds of all this and I ran out of paper.

Anyway, they both busked all day, playing their bongos and getting free rides on the tube (�We�re blind and we pretend not to speak English. They usher us through rather than try and deal with us!�) Soon after the party they had set up shop near an office I had to go to occasionally. Facing my fear head on, the first time I saw them I wandered straight up and said hi. After a lengthy explanation of who I actually was - apparently I hadn�t made quite the impression I thought I had with my stick fiddling � the familiar guilt sank in. I imagined these guys were coining it, working that salubrious area / disability combo that had already by that time done so much for the marketably blind Andreas Bocelli.

The problem of avoiding eye contact as I passed and appearing rude was obviously non-existent, so I took to simply walking past them. My natural paranoia, however, told me that they could sense me walking past and snubbing them thanks to some heightened sightless sixth sense, a fear that was seemingly compounded when they were less than friendly to me the next time I met them at a party, though chances are they were just even more stoned than usual.

Late on in the night, one of them disappeared into the toilet and didn�t come out for some time, causing some concern. �He�s probably crapped in the bath and is too embarrassed to come out!� said his friend, supportively, though he had in fact just fallen asleep.

Anyway, it was enough to convince me that their was no way around their psychic minefield, and I ended up convincing the office to let me e-mail stuff in from home.

It�s been OK lately, though. I haven�t met any buskers, and those I did know, I have lost contact with. A bongo or a piano showtune heard down a long corridor can still send a shiver down my spine, though.

I�m not sure about the technical term for �the fear of meeting buskers that you know�. The nearest I could get was Chrometomelophobia, which is the fear of paying for music, which isn�t it at all. Perhaps we could get away with Sociochrometomelophobia � can that be the fear of a society that pays for music? Still not there. Maybe one day, medical science will catch up.

Last night I mostly enjoyed a great reading by Al@n Bennett, the writer who most famously penned the film �The M@dness of King George the Third�, which equally famously had to be renamed in the USA as �The M@dness of King George�, because US film distributors felt that Americans would think they had missed the first two instalments.

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