London 2012 Hackney Citizens’ Diary: Day 4

By Hackney Citizen | Tuesday 31 July 2012 at 21:37
Antique flag at Imperial & Standard in Hackney Wick

Antique flag at Imperial & Standard in Hackney Wick. Photograph: Hackney Citizen

9.30pm: The Hackney Citizen’s undercover security guard writes:

“It’s a new experience for me to be in uniform. It changes a lot of things. I find that as soon as I put on my over-designed Olympics kit, suddenly every tourist and member of the public begins to trust me.

“This generally comes in the form of questions about directions, like the German who asked me how to get to Stratford from Piccadilly Circus at 5am on Sunday morning, but also people on the tube asking me who’s won medals and people in shops holding up the queue to ask me what I’m doing and where.

“In fact, people’s attitudes towards me change completely as soon as I’m in uniform; suddenly I’m an approachable, useful and even vaguely sympathetic figure, a real-life embodiment of five years’ worth of news stories.

“It’s also attracting the paparazzi; today I got asked to step into the swanky office of a Shoreditch ad agency on my walk home, where I was photographed for an online, Olympic-themed art project they’re conducting, and at work I’m constantly being photographed by press and spectators.

“But the flipside of the change in public response is the change you feel in yourself when you put a uniform on. As much as it can be a way of becoming anonymous under the function of a job, a uniform also makes you responsible, and I feel personally responsible to fulfil people’s requests.

“There was a special one today: a young girl came up to me and asked me to present the Polish team with a necklace she had made them out of Hema beads, consisting of a white-and-red heart and five colored rings.

“Needless to say, it was the sweetest piece of homemade jewellery I have ever seen, and although the Polish team had already left, I have held on to the necklace and will deliver it at the first opportunity. I’m just hoping that the language gap doesn’t make it look as if I’ve made it for them, ‘cos I’m meant to be a hardboiled security guard…”

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