The Metropolis

A possibly apocryphal story about inner-city onion crime

Mike Pollitt | Tuesday 24 May, 2011 11:53

A friend of a friend likes to run. He’s pretty advanced by now (completed a marathon, owns all the kit etc), and likes to go on long boomeranging jaunts from his Bethnal Green home. The other day, on one such run, he had returned to within a few minutes of home when he heard a thudding sound behind him. The sound was too dim to have been metallic, but instinctively he stopped and turned to check if his iPod, or some such device, had fallen from him onto the floor. It had not, but on the pavement a foot behind him was a slightly damaged onion, unpeeled but with the skin flaking off where it had struck the pavement. The runner thought this odd, until his gaze was drawn sharply upwards by another onion flying towards him at head height. This one sailed by his ear. It was hurled by of a group of youths, all school age, who had taken up a position across the street. The runner challenged his assailants, enquiring what they thought they were doing. Their reply, predictably, was not verbal but vegetable. So he ran on, leaving the following questions unanswered:

1. Were the onions stolen, or acquired by legal means? If the latter, will rising food prices force downsizing to other vegetable missiles in future. Specifically shallots.
2. Is is a positive sign for our society that young East End hoodlums are using vegetables rather than knives to assail innocent passers by? Does the fact that the vegetable was unpeeled suggest that they don’t have access to any knives at all?
3. Have implicit allowances been made within the internal mechanisms of the hoodlums’ social group to allow onion handlers to cry onion tears without compromising their macho status, upon which it must be assumed the group hierarchy has been at least partly defined.

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