greetings from england

hello universe. i am in london which is the capital of england. and great britain. welcome welsh and scots and northern irish. this is your spiritual home. apparently. or not. i don't know. but come here anyway. come drink up this heady brew, this bubbling concoction of traffic and noise and off-beat characters and litter and red buses and music and business and fear and joy. come imbibe of this elixir and let us be as one...
right. so here i am. i have left the quiet streets of sweden and headed to the noise of london for the christmas holidays. christmas is weird here. nobody gets it. ok, not nobody but many people don't get it. it's the one time of year that you are more likely to be barged out of the way than any other. today i saw a guy pushing a woman out of the way because it was a squeeze to get off the tube. he pushed her twice. he'd made his point. she wasn't trying to be in the way, she couldn't move either. i saw an androgynous woman (i think, very masculine) a few years ago attack a woman in front of her family on the escalator in hamley's toyshop because she couldn't get past. then the husband of the attacked woman joined in, thinking the assailant was a man. what kind of way is this to behave? weird.... "i'm out buying presents for children to make it a magical, special christmas and you're in my way, therefore i must batter you to the floor".
but i think many people buying presents are doing it because they believe they have to and because they think they'll look stingy if they don't go mental and spend ridiculous amounts of money on useless things for ungrateful materialistic children. it's so ridiculous. what about not spending as much money and actually doing stuff with the kids? no wonder the world is in such a state when kids judge a parent's worth on how much they spend on presents.
and this year... the christmas lights are called 'winter lights' so as not to cause offence. won't be long before they call it 'mas so as not to offend. but 'mas sounds like mass and that will offend non-christians, too. they can call it 'winter expensive-crap-giving'. that's more like it.