Musical mockery

They’re back. In August the capital fills with bored, dim-witted, half-naked semi-vagrants who have nothing to do here but get in the way of Londoners who do have things to do here. Tourism is an invitation to robbery. If you aren’t going to a place to work, you’re going there to get worked over. The rites of mob travel invert all the natural obligations of xenophilia. Natives become swindlers and their victims happily connive in the evacuation of their own purses.

No one objects because it’s understood that a tourist isn’t a visitor in the proper sense. He’s in London but not engaged with it. He’s half here and half at home. He meanders about, surrounded by a gaggle of friends, or in a little family unit, jabbering away in his native tongue, consuming the trusted cuisine of his own nation, and gawping at sights he’s seen a million times in films and photographs.