Fish, Barrel, Bang., c/o : Ally Chisholm.,

Dear parents of Kimberly Patterperson,

I begin this letter by correctly quoting Edmund Burke. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
That quote does seem to be in vogue and I can only imagine it is so because a lot of people are doing nothing. However, a lot of those doing nothing aren’t good men in the first place and they are doing their great amounts of nothing in reaction to things that aren’t particularly evil. The quote is soon to be wrongly remembered as: All that is necessary for the triumph of anything I don’t like is that average people do nothing in response. There are fears and worries that soon people will be found sneezing and no one will say bless you and said sneezer will be pointing at all and sundry claiming them to be evil, under the false misunderstanding that good men surely would take the action of saying bless you.
This is of course something that you yourselves have brought up in the media in response to the tragedy that befell your daughter Kimberly. You felt that no one did anything to help her. I am sorry to say that the truth may be worse. Half the crowd were afraid to help. I’ve checked with our psychologists and this is common world wide. And half the crowd seemed to rather delight in your daughter’s demise. I on the other hand am not allowed to idly stand by and am compelled, by my sense of what is right, but largely by my seniors in the company to try to put you right with what you have misconceived about our city. Perhaps in doing so we can all better understand what happened to your daughter whilst here. I hope we can give you some peace and understanding.
The London tourist corporation are very sorry to hear of your loss. The death of Kimberly was a horrible incident and we must assure you that it is very uncommon to hear of anyone being eviscerated and eaten by a pack of hungry teenagers.
I understand that Kimberly had recently survived Thailand and didn’t get conned once. She did better than I did. I was trying to find the Royal Palace and somehow got whisked off in a Tuktuk to go shopping for three days against my will. And yet she, in her letters to you, stated that she found London harder to deal with. I can only suggest that she came ill prepared and perhaps we can tell you where she went wrong. Let us clear some things up for you to assure you that we are doing all we can to make this city ever better. Hopefully in the future, armed with this knowledge you will feel confident enough to send your friends and family here and feel safe in the knowledge that most people on the streets of London may not talk to you but they certainly will not consider ripping you open and eating your innards.
It transpires that the high stress levels within Kimberly had attracted the feral like teenagers. They don’t like stressed foreigners complaining about their home. They certainly won’t help you with your shopping if they don’t like your temperament. I’m sorry to report that onlookers had found your daughter to be really whiny and that won’t sit well in harsh parts of town. I have found that the best course of action is to not speak. This was my usual practice on the New York subway, thinking that a posh English accent would not have aided me in the Bronx at all.
So, stay calm. Don’t be stressed as Kimberly was. Here are some of the things you need to understand that your daughter didn’t:
I think her biggest gripe was that the cost of living in London is too high. I’m not sure what your daughter was used to but perhaps she would have felt comfortable shopping in pound stretcher or Iceland. Both these chains of shops do great deals. This way you can make your money go further. Department stores are really rather bloody expensive. I once bought a watermelon for twenty pounds simply because I could.
London has tried to price out the poor in recent times as we feel that it is the poor that tend to be the ones killing and eating tourists. Those high prices are our way of rooting out the undesirables. But unfortunately they keep coming and all they do is complain about the prices, which in turn makes them mad and more dangerous. We make the galleries and museums free in full knowledge that the poor don’t want culture. Your daughter could have had a very cheap day shopping in pound stretcher and touring all the museums. It is also worth adding that if you live here you don’t go on too many madly expensive shopping sprees. Who does? I’m sorry she was not well informed with regards to this.
I was once asked how much it costs to enter the parks in London. I know from my travels that Tokyo for instance charges to enter some of their lovely parks. For the grand cost of nothing I would suggest a lovely walk to the top of Primrose Hill where the view is oh so nice.
Now, such a day out would be dependent on the weather. Some information regarding this: We have seasons in this country. Yes, the bad weather does get us down and make us drink more alcohol (More of this in a minute). If you arrive in this country in what we call winter, which used to be from November through to February but is now extending to April or May due to larger countries causing global warming and strange weather patterns, you can expect it to be cold. If you arrive in summer it might be warm but not Pacific Northwest type warm. Sometimes we have autumn and spring but these are getting rarer. People on a whole don’t come to this small island for the weather. It is possible to stay here for a short period, say one month, and never experience even reasonable weather. If this bothers you then check which season we’re in. The weather here is not extreme. It’s just crappy. Downside is the crappiness. The upside is a lack of earth quakes, tornados and blizzards. The London tourist corporation has started to produce t-shirts that are readily available on our website printed with the slogan: “Live with crappy weather. Die with extreme conditions. Choose London.” I designed that one and I’m rather proud of it.
However, all public transport will be affected by any changeable weather. See this to be a great excuse to skip work and treat it like a bank holiday.
With regards to public transport: I am sorry to hear that your daughter had a lot of trouble understanding the social nuances of the London Underground. Let me tell you that there is no queuing system in place. If you want to witness the best queuing system in the world I highly recommend the Wimbledon tennis championships that take place in the last week of June and the first week of July. You’ll never see such civilised and organised queuing. We are trying to rectify the underground problems and have been experimenting with zones to stand in whilst awaiting trains so that people can safely get on and off. Of course no one takes any notice and people stand wherever they want and it quickly becomes a free for all. We have tried announcing in ten different languages to let people off the train first but this has changed nothing. There are a few simple steps to deal with this. Firstly: Who the hell would travel in rush hour anyway? Don’t do it. It’s silly. If you do have to do it then you have a choice of not getting on a busy crowded train and waiting three minutes for the next one. People seem to forget that they have this choice and prefer to fight for inches. Try being polite and ignoring rude people. There are so many rude people in the world and you can’t teach them all a lesson by standing on their toes.
We still can’t get everyone to stand on the right on the escalator, despite being quite sure that this is in fact a universal law of escalators. We are pushing for escalator training to be placed in the national curriculum but the problem seems to be multi national.
We have long since thought that we have a smiling problem in this country. We’re not very good at it. We are excellent at and have perfected the friendly moaning, grumbling and complaining but still rarely smile in a carefree way. I just got back from Borneo where they are all grinning all the time. It was something to see. We are trying to instil such spirit here but we think it will take time.
Smiling seems to take place in the pubs a lot. Kimberly wrote to you saying that she had encountered a lot of junkies and, as she put it, eight pm drunks. We are not proud of our junkies but we do revel in the idea that we are leading the way in what we call free thinking drinking. Free thinking drinking will be the next slogan on a t-shirt. It’s cool to get hammered at any time and any day of the week. This may have upset your daughter but with this many people in a city it’s good to spread the alcoholism across the week. Every Londoner knows that only the tourists go out in the West End at the weekend. To avoid the weekend madness I recommend a good Thursday session. In recent research I have personally spent time in San Francisco on an exchange programme talking to heroin addicts to see how they make their town seem more glamorous. The secret is to be scary in a laid back fashion. When we brought our heroin addict friends to London they were appalled at the extraverted aggressive scary behaviours they witnessed but they understood that alcohol makes you crazy in a very different way.
For a long time we were indeed worried that we have a drinking problem here. People seem to be spending too much time in pubs. There was a sharp incline in recent times. We put that down to a natural reaction to the US’s foreign policy and their desire to mess up the world for some years now and before that it was the acceptable answer to being stabbed in the back by what we thought was a left wing government that turned out to be just as bad as the right wing one it took over from.
Further research will show that this is widespread throughout the world. Check out the price of vodka in Moscow. All is not lost. It turns out that people drink a lot but they also go to the cinema and theatre and museums. Sometimes they stay in and play scrabble or read a book.
Do not make the two crucial mistakes that Kimberly made. Drunken people come out at night. This too is universal. People like that in London there is night life any day of the week. Ignore drunk people that you don’t want to deal with. They get bored and go away. Don’t get stressed by it and don’t get aggressive. We seem to be having a growing problem of tourists getting drunk and telling each other to fuck off and saying how horrible London is. To real Londoners this is funny. The last rule again is simple and universal. If you live in a crappy part of town bad things might happen. Choose where you live carefully and then act accordingly. Several witness statements said that Kimberly’s last act was to stick her middle digit up at the pack of teenagers who were actually minding their own business.
In London, more than anywhere else, if you mind your own business you get by. People come here for the anonymity and there certainly are a lot of people coming here. There is nowhere in the world that is problem free but sitting here in this office overlooking one of our many parks it’s hard to imagine where the problems start. It all depends on what you come here looking for. I’m not sure what Kimberly was looking for but she was looking in all the wrong places. You tell me that she thought people were ill mannered. I use the underground every day. People rush about and get to where they’re going and never say a word as they hurtle around town. Poor Kimberly, she didn’t understand. No one wanted to be rude. I doubt they gave her much thought as she was just swallowed up by the city.
You’ll be pleased to know that we now hand out flyers at the airport to deter people from going where Kimberly went and behaving as she did. There are Londoners who want you to keep on thinking this town is crap. The more you say it and the more people you deter, the more of London they can have to themselves, tourist free. It would be considered churlish to try to shoot down your way of thinking, to expose your misunderstanding, and point out how little you know. It would be easy. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. But my job is to convince you how wrong you are, to shoot away. We wouldn’t be a very good tourist corporation if we didn’t. Once again I offer our deepest condolences for your loss.