Inspired by Inspector Sands, being a Brixtonian, I could not resist...
Brixton Tube has two main ones, the woman who plays the comb. A colleague asked me what all that is about; I explained, 'she plays the comb'. Why? 'Because that's what she does'. There is the black man on a bike, whose name I know from the police but why post it? He used to cycle up and down the stretch of Brixton Road between the Tube and Kentucky Fried Rat selling TDK cassettes and muttering. Now that market has dried up, he just mutters. His muttering is virulently anti-white but he's seriously deluded rather than agitating racial hatred. Alan has moved on. I know his name because the staff at Brixton Tube used the Public Address system to ask him to stop pouring lager into the ticket machines.
The Christians come in all shapes and forms; I suspect most of the street evangelists are themselves victims of brainwashing by evangelical cults who prey on the vulnerable. There's one who paces up-and-down outside Kentucky Fried Rat, alternating out-of-tune belting-with-full-lungs snatches of some Revivalist hymn, with an increasing desperate exhortation to us to repent of our sins. There used to be a man outside the Tube who repeated ad nauseam "Repent, these are the Last Days, repent these are the Last Days." He's moved on.
In my immediate neighbourhood there's the hat woman. In winter she is never out without one of those 70s style pseudo-Russian fake fur hats. In summer, her shower cap. We also used to have the woman who murdered her husband, but sadly she has moved on to join him. Used to be a teacher.
On Streatham Hill there is the bus spotter. Often spotted outside Brixton garage, sometimes on buses. Keeps a record in his notebook of all the buses that go past. 159, 57, 137, 59, 118, 417.
There's the guy who hangs out at the Big Junction, offering to wash your windscreen (how 90s!), but he lacks squeegee or bucket. He also runs with the traffic, a look in his eyes of a petrified rabbit caught in the headlights. I've seen him running with the traffic along the A23 desperate to get out of the traffic, unable to calculate that a swiftturn to right or left would get him there, especiallyover the pedestrian crossing which happens to have a green man showing...
Then there's C. When I first moved to Streatham I immediately clocked him as the Village Idiot, and found nothing to change my view. I was really quite shocked to learn he is the partner of a LibDem ex-councillor and erstwhile Parliamentary Candidate for elsewhere, who is very nice, highly qualified, highly intelligent and conscientious. C. gets on buses, sees small children sitting quietly with parents and embarks into a rant at the parents for their audacity in bringing their foetuses into public.
Then there's the pimps, petty thieves, nutters, prostitutes and con-merchants, but less said about my friends the better..
