WHY ARE SO MANY BEAUTIFUL WOMEN IN LONDON SMOKING?

 I am walking down the road at a steady pace.

 Busy road.  London, late morning. Ahead of me is a woman in high heels, red jeans and matching red jacket. Her shoes are going clack –clack- clack, like a duck song. Beautiful woman. Her pace is similar to mine, if not faster and self confident. There is one problem, though. She is blowing smoke my way and adding to the menace of London’s polluted air, I can hardly breathe.  

“Many women are smoking, nowadays!” I moan to the other lady strolling beside me. Steady and springy and also click -click clicking her shoes.

“So what?” She brushes my question as though an unwelcome fly hovering over a cup of honey.

We carry on.

TRAVELS, GADGETS, I-PODS AND BUS STOP MUSIC...

All images by Freddy Macha

Times are hard.

Very.

Sometimes you are (ruthlessly) reminded about this through daily reports of muggings, mass murder and pick pockets. Or how your budget does not fit the weekly shopping list, anymore. Salaries stay where they were ten years ago (and continually zoom down), while prices shoot up.

 Is this something new? You tell me.

I have always travelled.

 Either on foot to school when I was a little kid growing on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro; and a robust teenager on a (two days!) train journey from Arusha to Morogoro where I finished High School at Mzumbe in the 1970’s recession. Back then we thought things were tough.

Well, fact is they were. We had Black September hijacking planes.

“The cause of Palestinians must be heard!” shouted the determined militants. Those green days, the cause (and case) of Palestinians felt new. I had grown up believing Jews are the chosen children of God and anyone else is a dustbin. Truth is everyone is a child of God. We are all here to reap the rewards (and disasters) of mother earth.