Opinionist: Crowd Excited By Unutterably Mundane Event

Dave Haste
By Dave Haste Last edited 211 months ago
Opinionist: Crowd Excited By Unutterably Mundane Event
Oooh a puddle! How interesting!

At Londonist, about half of us know full well that South London is essentially rather grim, boring and pointless. The other half secretly knows this too, but they’re in denial because they have to live there.

To reinforce this, last week South London hosted the epitome of humdrum – the grand opening of a shiny new supermarket in Upper Norwood.

OK, we hear you saying, but supermarkets open all the time. Surely this sort of tedium is not a uniquely South London phenomenon? Well you would be right, if it wasn’t for the fact that this supermarket’s opening was heralded with a queue of 500 people waiting for it to open its doors.

Can any area really be so drab that the opening of a supermarket seems like an event worth queuing along the street at 9am for? We thought at first that the only logical explanation must be that the crowd was suffering from some oddly localised famine, with the new Sainsbury’s being the only source of food in the area. But, the truth turns out to be even odder – the crowd was actually excited!

One quote from a happy queuer:

We've received a guided tour of the store and it was so fantastic, I thought it was a dream. I thought I would go back there this morning and it would be gone.

And another:

I thought this couldn't be happening to the area because we've been so deprived. This is certainly going to make a huge difference.

And finally:

People have been talking about this a lot.

Geez – how boring is it down there?

Still, at least no-one was hospitalised, unlike the opening of Ikea's latest North London store. Maybe South London doesn't have exclusive rights to local stupidity after all...

Photo of an interesting new puddle taken from d’n’c’s Flickr photostream under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.

Last Updated 17 August 2006