Dear Tessa Watt...

Tessa Watt - one of the newest group of idiots forcing hippy-minded lunacy on the city of London.


Watt is one of three "masterminds" of Slow Down London, a ten day "festival" that will hit the city on the 24th of April. Londoners, beware, these fools are out to ruin your day. And, yes, those quote marks are entirely appropriate.


Apparently these ninnies think we in London - I live within the M25, don't question me! - walk too quickly and we are too rushed. Uh, no. We're just we're busy. To combat this, Watt et all have organised a series of events to make us appreciate life more: a seminar on how the texts and emails have erased the art of letter writing, yoga lessons and workshops and Charles Dutoit will conduct music by Prokofiev


Don't get me wrong, that's all fine. The Independent on Sunday's Gardening columnist doing a day of activities? Wonderful.


A group of morons holding a "go-slow" across Waterloo Bridge at rush hour on a Monday morning? Fuck you. One of the busiest pedestrian commuter points in the city and these... these... imbeciles think it'll be a good idea to stroll across in a journey that will take an hour. As a user of that bridge, let me tell you you can walk it in minutes. Forget walking across, anyone who participates in this idiocy deserves to be thrown off.


Not only this, but organisers will be handing out pretend speeding tickets to anyone they view as walking too quickly. Excuse me? Have you walked on the streets around Westminster/Green Park? Tourists walking so bloody slowly a sloth has a higher mile per month total. Forget speeding tickets, London needs to start handing out fines to people who randomly stop in the middle of a pavement, or who aren't paying attention when the little green man appears and so linger on the pavement, forcing us to step around them, the crowd parting like the Red Sea.


Luckily, this part of the exercise will only last one day. Oh, they've got it organised for all ten, but all the volunteers will be in hospital within hours.


Tessa Watt is attempting to justify her insanity by saying "There’s a sense in a city like London that we do tend to run around like mad rabbits in a hutch. We get angry with someone ambling slowly on the pavement, and we want to throttle someone if they haven’t got their Oyster card out at the gate of the Tube. Things are a little bit out of hand.”


Miss Watt (and I am assuming you're a "Miss" here), have you ever been in a crowded Tube station? I was in Victoria at 5:30 on a Wednesday afternoon where they actually had to close the gates because the platforms were so packed. 200+ of us, all waiting to get through 7 gates to escalators that doubtlessly wouldn't work. I swear to God, anyone in that crowd who didn't have their Oyster card out ready to get through those gates - therefore holding everyone up - should be shipped to Australia and dropped in a vat of acid. And then shot. Twice.


There is a Cittaslow programme: towns can sign up and make crap like this their city policy. Ludlow, Diss, Aylsham, Mold, Perth, Linlithgow, Berwick-upon-Tween and Cockermouth have all signed up. So, Tessa, take your teams of cretins and travel to Shropshire, Norfolk, Wales, Northern England and Scotland and provide this service to people who are less likely to use your speeding tickets to inflict a deadly number of papercuts on you.


A warning to any of the volunteers working the slowdownlondon.co.uk event: I'm going to be back and forth in London every two to three days for the next few weeks. If you try to flyer me, I'll slap you, you try to slow me down and I'll punch you, and if you try to give me a speeding ticket you better damn well pray that Mr Johnson's traffic jams are moving faster than the pavements, otherwise the ambulance will never reach you in time.