Acquiring

In Cornmarket Street this afternoon a young woman squatted on the pavement behind a chess board challenging passers-by to a game of three-minute chess. Next to her a sign said that she was trying to raise £750 to visit her mother sick with breast cancer in an Australian hospital. The games were free but any player or observer could add to the weight of coins in her collection bag if they chose, and many did. Another sign said that she was a former college number one. It seemed that most of her contenders were college number twos. They were fast. Hands flashed to move pieces before I had even worked out the implications of the previous move. She was gracious when she won and admiring when she (rarely) lost. The mood was good.

Ten minutes later in Queen Street I watched three men police officers flag down a bus bound for Barton (a notoriously deprived area of Oxford). Two got on and one guarded the bus door. They moved slowly through the bus looking at passengers until they got to the back of the top deck where one spoke to a woman then got her to follow him off the bus. A couple of minutes later the other police officer got off with an armful of packaging. She was being accused of shoplifting. She stood calmly and answered their questions. She didn’t have many bags so if she had stolen anything it can’t have been bulky. Then I heard Primark (a low-cost clothes shop) mentioned so it can’t have been of vast value either. After a bit she was handcuffed and her composure started to dissolve. I left. I’d stopped being a witness (when I see a large power difference in an exchange I tend to stand back and watch, just in case) and started being a gawper.

I spent the rest of the afternoon pondering the social and personal differences that meant that one woman was likely to gain several hundred pounds from strangers who had no way of knowing whether her story was true nor whether others in her family could have provided her airfare, while the other was likely to end up in court accused of acquiring considerably less.

Edit - now musing on some symmetry between these two images - the hunched figures at the edges and what is between.