Best Little Whorehouse in London

London is divided into a series of boroughs, and I happen to live in the borough of Camden. When I search through the Camden Borough website, I can find out all sorts of wonderful information about my community. For instance, my local ward councillors are Penelope Abraham, Peter Brayshaw, and the wonderfully named Fazlul Chowdhury. I absolutely adores that name. Fazlul Chowdhury. I think I'm going to call him up and feign some problem with Camden's services just so I can get on the horn and ask to speak to "Mr. Fazlul Chowdhury". Wonderful. If I ever go into politics, I'm going to need an equally cool name, something along the lines of...oh, I don't know, Humberto McGarnigal. Yeah, that sounds appropriate.

The best thing I found online for my borough were my local monthly crime statistics. I love this website. For instance, I can see that for the financial year of 2004-2005, there were almost 19,000 reported cases of theft, some 6,200 cases of violence against people, and more than 400 sexual assaults. And you can even break it down by month; this January (the most recent month currently up) saw about 400 burglaries, and, more troubling, five rapes to go with three murders. How safe do I feel?

One thing I like about England is the sense of common history and shared purpose with America. In political circles, it is known as the Trans-Atlantic Bargain (or Alliance), and it is obvious that the US and UK have a great deal of inter-mingling culture and history. They have York, we have New York. They had the Madness of King George, we have the stupidity of President George. They have a crime-ridden area going by the name of Camden, we have Camden, New Jersey, the most dangerous city in America. Simpatico, baby!!

Beyond its obvious need for some kind of Robocop to clean up the area, Camden is famous for two things: its canal and, more notably, its market, which comprises a shopping area famous enough to draw somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million tourists a year through its cramped corridors. But it was the canal that commanded my attention this last Sunday, when I decided to take a walk along its banks in search of the promisingly named area known as Little Venice. I could make a post about the blatant false advertising that went into naming this place, and the fact that I had to walk almost five miles roundtrip to see this area, but I think I will let things slide with just making a suggestion to the tourist board of London. If you want to more accurately rename this area and yet still incorporate the words "Little Venice", then I recommend the following slogan: "This area bears very little resemblance to Venice."

Anyway, that's not the point of all this. The point of all this is that I think I was propositioned by a floating brothel Sunday afternoon. A single, thin canal boat was motoring upstream, the same direction I was going, moving at a rather leisurely pace. I feel confident in guessing that the boat was powered by a motor from a Hoveround, since I was merely walking and ending up not only catching up to this boat, but passing it on the fly. A couple sat at the controls, and as I came up on them, the woman, at this point a mere fifteen feet away from met (it's a fairly narrow canal), said to me, "Hey pretty boy, do you want to join us?"

I honestly have been trying to think of any way that this sentence could be said to a complete stranger without it involving them operating some sort of cat house on the open waters of London's canals, but I am failing to think of any alternatives. I can't help but feel I dodged some sort of bullet on this one, as I may just have been another number on the sexual assault list for Camden's March statistics. Whew.