No-one could ever accuse me of being paranoid, but there are dark forces at work in west London at the moment.
This evening, just the day after the odd besuited men surveyed me on my health and general well-being, I was walking around Shepherd's Bush Green to get the tube station when I noticed a man clocking me. He was not besuited, in fact he was wearing quite a scruffy plasticy overall, but he was holding a clicking counting device in his hands. As the two women in front of me passed him he clicked one of the buttons on the top (there were several different counters on the one piece of equipment) and as I passed he pressed a different button once.
For some reason it was his job to count and categorise the pedestrians walking along the green at around 5 o clock in the evening. Who would want to know this information? And give that two of the five clickers were clearly to register male and female, what were the other three for?
This wasn't the classy operation I had witnessed yesterday. Not only was the census taker dishevelled, he was doing his canvassing surreptitiously, without so much as cheery "Are you all right?" That's what happens if you send one man to do a job designed for two.
Sure he had some kind of uniform, but it was a half-hearted attempt, (an even less impressive version of the garb worn by the malevolent porter in Naples) which made one more suspicious of his motives. Within about fifty metres I had convinced myself that this fella was a charlatan, who was working for himself and who probably got some kind of perverse sexual excitement from counting passersby, dividing them into five sub-groups of his choosing. What these sub groups were we will never know. Who is to say what was going on in his twisted mind? I had assumed that it had been divided between the sexes because the women got a different button to me, but perhaps the man was judging each of us on our relative sexual attractiveness. If so I was either at 1 or 5 in his depraved scale. I'm not sure whether I'd prefer to be considered attractive or unattractive to such a deviant. Who am I kidding? I hope it was a five. Christ, at my age, it's just great when anyone at all shows an interest!
However, despite my certainty at the sexual waywardness of this plasticy statistician, suddenly my (entirely fair and understandable) preconceptions were dashed. Because a bit further along the path was another man, similarly attired, who also had a counter with buttons on it and a clipboard. Was he there to check the other one's work? Was it really that complicated a task? Or were they trying to work out how many people walked about 50 metres along the green and then carried on walking, and how many people just mysteriously vanished on this short stretch of pavement?
Whatever the case the second man wasn't going to be much help. He looked quite bored and cold and had put down his clipboard and his counter on a railing and was making no attempt to calculate or divide the people passing him.
If their bosses had had any sense they would have put the two men together and the second fella who clearly wasn't cut out for the counting business could have been employed to say "Are you all right?" to everyone who went by, perhaps adding, "This is our real job. We're not doing this because we have a prurient interest in counting people based on their comparative sexual attractiveness." You know, just to allay any fears that any normal person would justifiably have. He could then add, "But if we were doing that, you'd definitely be a 5!" And he could give a cheery wink. And send people off on their way with a spring in their step.
And then if in their spare time he and his friend wanted to masturbate over the data they had accumulated then no-one but the most frigid frump would deny them that pleasure. After they'd been so polite and all.
It would certainly explain the plastic overalls.
