The day after

Usually it happens in France, sometimes in Italy or Spain and infrequently in Germany, Poland, Hungary, not in Austria. Generally it doesn’t take place in the UK but yesterday it occurred in London: a strike.

A tube strike to be more precise. Apparently the cause for this strike was plans of the TFL to cut hundreds of jobs. However nobody seemed to understand why they’ve been striking. Because the British are not used to standing up for their rights, going out to the streets and striking. That’s different in France. Strikes are happing approx twice a week. That’s normal. They like striking, demonstrating, protesting. Actually I experienced my first ‘manifestation’ (pronounced French!) in Paris last weekend when all of a sudden thousands of people were highly excited running through the streets. They were facing hundreds of policemen on the opposite trying to mater the situation that seemed to be chaotic but actually wasn’t. Because they’re used to that.

Coming back to the UK. It’s the day after. It seems that everybody has survived - we made it through the strike without any major chaos apart from totally congested streets all over the city (the fewest took Boris’ advice of talking their bikes for getting to work – Londoners are basically lazy – but drove in their cars to work… what a bad idea!). How annoying is that? Strikes are not taking place very often around here so I was expecting at least a bit of a chaos. Nothing! Today everything seems to be fine again. We’re back in our everyday life – we’re back in our totally normal daily chaos here in London.