Friday 22 May 2009

He moves in mysterious ways

Every day this week, I've been briskly walking from London Bridge to Wapping, from train station to office, and back again. On my way, I've been trying to appear in as many strangers' holiday photos as possible, somewhere in the frame between their loved ones – who may on vacation have become their barely tolerated ones, you never know until you actually go away with someone – and Tower Bridge. Not striding brazenly in front of the human subject, obviously. I'm not a bitch. Just somewhere else in shot. What will happen, of course, is that someone in Tokyo, or Berlin, or Adelaide, will be looking through their friends' holiday photos in a few months' time, thinking, 'Other people's holiday photos are even duller than other people's amazing-night-out stories. How soon can I go home and drink my own tea and eat my own biscuits which are so much better than these?' when they will see me scowling my blurry way through the frame, fall in love with my peaky, myopic countenance, carefully put their superior biscuits in an airtight tin, take their passport out of a drawer and set off to find me. I seem to spend my life passing through embryonic romantic comedies and not getting past the set-up. An embryonic romantic comedy in itself. Dear McConaughey and Hudson, you can have that one.

Anyway. Yesterday morning, as I walked past the London Assembly building, I passed a small, silent, non-storm of protestors. They held up banners saying things like, 'Don't drive us round the bend, Boris', in an effort, I surmised, to persuade the mayor not to scrap bendy buses. 

And there, at the eye of the gentle breeze, stood a diminutive figure, impassive under an army-style cloth cap and enormo-shades.

Bono.

It might not have been Bono. But it looked EXACTLY like him. Small (I can say this, a friend of mine worked on a photoshoot with him and saw his Cuban heels at close range), with sunglasses, and sending out an air that said, 'Drink in my very presence, because I am bloody well Bono.'

Bono loves a protest. He's hot for a petition. Most likely, he simply cannot accept all the invitations he gets to hoist banners in the name of suffering children, lame trees, down-and-out animals, ailing buildings and people who, for the love of God, want to hold on to those bendy buses. Luckily, he has an army of lookalikes – he probably even calls them Bono's Army –  who are keen to supplement the income they get from being a member of Achtung Maybe or With Or Without Them, or whatever, with a bit of stand-in campaign work. After all, times are hard, and those sunglasses don't come cheap.

In fact, I think this troupe of doppelganger activists represent yet another humanitarian gesture on Bono's part. In this case, he's specifically supporting FauxBonos (that would be so much better if I could spell it FoBonos) who can't sing a note and have been kicked out of Even Better Than The Real Thing for being much, much worse. Bono is honestly a hell of a guy.

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