People who pay by credit card in a pub. What's wrong with cash you pikies?!

People who take their bikes on the train. Cyclists should all be shot on principle, but this lot would be the first up against the wall.

Big issue sellers. Again not a problem in itself, but the fact that every single one of them all claim to only have one left is beginning to grate.

This is a SW London one....Minor Public school chaps in rugby shirts and floppy hair standing around in places that block your way, drinking over-priced beer with bits of fruit stuck in the bottle whilst braying about how much their house is worth, before popping off to the gents to powder their noses with the one substance on the planet that makes them even more arrogant.

I would rather work in an abbatoir in the middle of a heatwave than go to Putney on the day of a rugby international. In fact I think I would rather eat a Benjys roll than do that.

David, thanks for the heads up on Putney! We are heading over there this week-end to start apartment/home shopping, looking at a place in the Manor Fields development and a home that is technically in Roehampton. We want to be reasonably close to Richmond Park without splashing out for Richmond real estate.
We don't do pubs as a rule, but hear that Enoteca Turi on Putney High Street has a great selection of Italian regional wines. My husband has never tasted Barolo so...
Adding to my list are the gal pal mums with prams who insist on walking leisurely side by side while gabbing about life, love, lipstick, whatever, hogging up the whole sidewalk and acting as if you want dingoes to eat their babies when you try to get by. It's more of a suburban affliction (but also happens on Kensington High Street).

All this wonderful stuff <b>and</b> a Royal Family, too...makes the rest of us feel absolutely deprived.

This is what our world needs more of, a good sense of humor!!! Thanks everyone for a good laugh on a Monday morning.

People who STAND on the left-hand side of the escalators when others are trying to walk or sprint up.......
ABSOLUTELY LETHAL!

All this talk about tourists clogging up sidwalks - excuse, me, pavements - leads me to ask a stupid, but sincere question:

What side of the pavement are you supposed to walk on in London? Every time I've been there it was a complete free-for-all. I always assumed that since you drive on the left, you'd walk on the left, too. But no, it seems half the population, and half the tourists, walk on the left and half on the right, making it almost impossible to make any progress and causing knots of people to clump up in the middle of the pavement, with the next wave stumbling into them. And then there are your staircases and escalators - same confusion there, with people going up and down on left and right willy-nilly. What's the ambulatory traffic pattern SUPPOSED to be?

Did I miss it or did no one really mention one of the most dangerous things about London to those of us from across the pond: Look RIGHT before crossing the street!!

StCirq:

There's no correct side.

All you're supposed to do is switch your brain on. The reasons London pavements (and please let's keep English as the working language here) are so difficult to manoeuvre these days - they weren't 30 years ago - are:

1. The number of visitors who, because they're from slow-thinking parts of the world, or are of the age (14-30) people's brains simply don't work, just can't get out of the way of people walking at a proper urban speed, and

2. 30 years' manic squandering of my money by London's far too many layers of adminstration on bloody stupid, pavement-cluttering bollards, phone boxes (mostly built back in the dark ages phones were a State monopoly), litter bins (just don't eat or drink the junk in the first place) and an infinity of signs telling an unreading public stuff that's bleedin' obvious.

Incidentally, every year or so someone comes on this board telling us we should walk on a &quot;correct&quot; sign of the pavement. No such concept exists in New York or Paris, so where does this bizarre idea come from?

&lt;&lt;No such concept exists in New York or Paris, so where does this bizarre idea come from?&gt;&gt;

To the contrary. Whether or not there's a &quot;correct&quot; side of the pavement to walk on, in both Paris and New York foot traffic moves on the left without anything like the snarls you come across in London. Of course there's always the odd fellow going against traffic, but generally speaking everyone's got the pattern down and there's a flow.

Ooops! Actually, it moves on the right in Paris and New York!

I will add to the list of dangers trying to see something at Westminster Abbey in the morning when it's full of tour groups !! I frightened, really. I cannot move to the sides, just walking straight...couldn't see the floor just the ceiling and there were very rude guides from other tours , not yours, that thought you were hearing them (I really don't know what I were supposed to do not to hear them in a lot of different languages)and get offended !!

A very hard time there for me !!

Some more dangers for the unsuspecting...

- getting sucked into a conversation with drunken old Irish men in pubs. You WILL regret it...
- the 'Metro' dash. This involves watching enviously people on the Tube in the morning as they glance through their free copy of Metro, trying to judge when they're going to finish it and lunging to grab it when they drop it on the space behind their heads without decapitating them and getting into a tussle with the other person trying to do the same beside you. 'Metro envoy' has now entered the English language
- eating establishments in Leicester Square. Just don't do it...
- cyclists, just generally. I've been brutally run over by a cyclist who didn't see why he should stop at a red light when the green man was flashing, and then launched into a tirade at me for bending his front wheel - never mind my legs!
- bendy buses at corners. These huge beasts just don't fit onto London roads. If you're standing on a corner and see one coming, STAND BACK, preferably in a shop doorway - they can't get you there
- bus conductors. I've been pushed and abused by more bus conductors than any spotty youths. Send them to Afghanistan - Osama will wish he had never been born
- Borough Market at Friday lunchtime. Lives will one day be lost in the crush to get a hot pork sandwich

This is great. I can apply most of this stuff to tourists in NYC as well!!!

The group of argentinian teenage girls, who have a 10+ minute discussion as to whether they want to come into the attraction, how much it is for a guided tour, how much for self-guided, how much off they'll get if they all pay at once and translating it into and out of spanish at each question. Then, asking the poor cashier to write it all down for them... all on a sunny sunday afternoon at a popular tourist attraction. Decide ahead of time, have one person pay for everyone! If you can't decide whether you want to pay or not, just leave!

Oh crap, &quot;Metro envy&quot; is a recognised condition? And here I thought I was lunging surreptitiously!!!!

Sometimes I think the absolutely most dangerous thing in London is trying to exit the Leicester Square tube station via the stairs on the west side of Charing Cross Rd. Thousands (only a SLIGHT exaggeration) pouring down both sides of the stairs while one is trying to elbow oneself through the mob. I'd assume it feels exactly like what a poor salmon goes through struggling up stream to spawn . . . .

No Janis, the most dangerous spot in London is Oxford Circus on the Saturday before Christmas - or when the H&amp;M store has a big sale, as it happened two weeks ago while I was in London. I thought I was going to get trampled and crushed all over. And this comes from somebody who is used to the Carnaval crowds in the streets of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil...

Good post- that put a smile on my face. I hope I can back to London someday. I was there last November and loved it (didn't buy the Manchester United gear, but thought about a &quot;Mind the Gap&quot; shirt...lol).

This was hilarious! Glad to see Londoners still have a sense of humor. Maybe I should move--people shoot each other on the streets of Anchorage. Pigeon poop and escalator nitwits sounds milder.

This is a little offtrack, but twice on this thread people talked about how hot it is in London right now. On the morning of the bombings I paid particular attention to what people were wearing, as I'm going there next month. Almost every person (except emergency personnel) had coats or jackets on. Doesn't look very warm to me. You'd almost never find people in coats this time of year in the U.S. 92 degrees here today. Now that's hot!