December 20, 2004
Christmas Pillow-Fight
I’ve just woken up after the best night's sleep I've had for ages. The reason being that I took part in a huge, exhausting pillow-fight in Trafalgar Square yesterday. Well… it is Christmas. after all!
Boy it was fun!
Surreptitiously organised by the guys behind Mobile Clubbing, several hundred modern-day jousters converged in front of the National Gallery ready for kick-off at 18:09 on the dot. For the most part, pillows were subtly concealed in bags or under clothes, although a few people had obviously been to the department stores on Oxford Street to buy their armaments. When the moment came, it was chaos and friendly mayhem ensued for the next forty minutes or so.
Feathers flew everywhere as pillow-fighters young and old (I’d say the age range was from 4 to around 64) and tourists ran for cover – scaring foreign tourists is always high on a Londoner’s priority list; it’s our revenge for their continuously asking questions and getting in the way on the buses during rush hour.
There were some particularly violent contenders… unsurprisingly these were mainly girls. I thought someone had cracked one of my teeth out at one point, but I got her back with a swift backhand blow to the face that I developed over the course of the battle.
Next time I’ll come armed with two pillows and I’ll make sure that at least one of them contains real feathers; the light, synthetic one that I was brandishing was good in the cut and thrust, but lacked the weight that some of my opponents had.
I’m not sure what the carol singers in the middle of the Square thought when they were attacked by a cheerful mob of ruffians wielding soft weapons, but they seemed to take it in their stride well enough… I pity the nice lady who announced “you have to sing carols if we want to be here…” Needless to say, she got walloped.
I left during the tidy-up operation (I did help a bit, but there comes a point when you realise that feathers are bio-degradable and that the paving slabs on Trafalgar Square haven’t been shiny since they were laid). The place was still full of smiling faces – not a bad result on a freezing cold December evening.
All good stuff!
/Dom