The Big Smoke

It’s morning and your trousers/skirt/bra/T-shirt/socks/tights are gathered around you in an angry knot. Part of your body is under the duvet, other bits have broken out in the night and are entangled with books, an upended water glass and what appears to be an entire box of tissues that someone, of malign intent, has shredded and scattered around the room.

You get up and look for your wallet/purse. You find it in the wastepaper bin. Looking inside your wallet/purse, you find a dispiriting state of affairs. Along with a single first-class postage stamp, a receipt from a curry house in Kilburn that you know, for sure, you have never visited and half a beer mat with the name Lilian/Jason written in felt-tip and a telephone number that consists entirely of zeros and sevens, you find only a tenner. Feature continues

You panic. No one can get by on a tenner in London. Having a tenner is, in essence, having nothing, and hanging on to your last one is merely putting off the inevitable. The trick, if you are going to shape up and come face to face with inescapable poverty and start living in a mature and planned way, is to get rid of the thing as soon as possible.

As long as you have the tenner you are putting off the next vital stage of your life journey. So, instead of thinking: Oh no! I’ve only got a tenner, what am I going to do with it? I try thinking: Oh yes! I’ve only got a tenner, what am I going to do with it? If you are a good person, you might give it to a poor person or donate it to Water Aid, who will use your cash to provide a family in Bangladesh with clean water for a month.

But you are a Londoner, so there is a chance, a strong chance perhaps, that you are not a good person. In which case you may want to do something bad with your tenner. Bad people can usually think of plenty of bad things to do, but if you are feeling a bit sluggish – after all, you are covered in shredded tissue and socks – or just not up to full bad speed yet, I have taken the precaution of inventing some suggestions. Here you are, then – ten bad things for Londoners to do with a tenner:

1 Roll it up and take cocaine
Really, this is a very bad and stupid thing to do, unless you are all for narco-militias, bankruptcy and heart attacks, but it might give you enough energy to make coffee.

2 Pay the congestion charge a day late
It would have been £8 if you had done it yesterday. And anyway, didn’t you promise to walk to work this month? All right, this isn’t very bad, but it’s lazy – and that’s half way.

3 Buy ten Lucky Dips at the newsagent
Listen, you won’t win the Lottery. Ever.

4 Buy yourself four cocktails at All Bar One in Leicester Square during happy hour
It might sound like fun, but technically it’s binge drinking…

5 … and so is this: spend it on three bottles of own-brand Sicilian red
...from Tesco Express in Covent Garden and drink them while sitting on some steps.

6 Purchase one chip at the Gala Golden Horseshoe Casino in Bayswater
See suggestion number three (although you do get to dress up for this one).

7 Donate it to the British National Party
Really, really bad. Up there with number one. Surely it’s better to bang yourself on the head repeatedly with a biggish stick?

8 Buy 20 copies of the Evening Standard
Remember, they killed Ken.

9 Exchange it for a large bag of skunk in Camden Town
Not as foolish as number one but, if you had planned on doing or saying anything for the rest of the week, a very foolish idea.

10 Lick it
According to New Scientist magazine, researchers in Switzerland dripped strains of human flu virus on to banknotes accompanied by human nasal mucus. Some strains of the virus remained viable for up to 17 days.

Anyway, it’s your tenner. You decide.