Gary Lineker, the leader we need

Is there a whiter place in London than Barnes? I ask only because I have been going there at the weekends for the last two years to buy artisan chocolate croissants and artisan coffee from a favourite artisan café (artisan is metropolitan for expensive), and to let my daughter bother the ducks at the picture perfect pond on the green. In that time I’ve been amazed by the lack of people of colour I have encountered. Once you start noticing you can’t stop. By my reckoning, in those two years I’ve seen only two people of colour in Barnes. A black man on a bike riding down the high-street, and an Indian-looking man working in the newsagent. I am not making this up. Everyone else I’ve observed in Barnes has been white. Not white like you see outside of London. Not grossly fat or tattooed or drunk. No one is ugly.