The sun is out today after a few shy weeks...in high definition light that catches the trees and the buildings - even the grey buildings look nice, and the fractals of nature calm the mind. The M62 between Liverpool and Manchester gets bumpy as you approach the city that Ian Brown once said lacked only one thing - a beach. The first railway between the two had to navigate swamps. The Earth still moves two hundred years later. Up and down on the concrete highway. I am out of my comfort zone today going for a free modelling shoot. The photographer is good and she calms me down. Soon I am in an office getting scammed...
But to that later...
I am in a world with a high wall on one side of my vision. A prison. It stands as a stark warning of where you can end up if you don't follow the rules. Below it are shops etching out a living. I pay five pound for three hours at a confusing ticket machine. After my shoot I am told to wait in the waiting room but I decide instead to get a coffee. There is a Syrian Food Shop opposite - you can sit in or take away and there is a coffee machine. The street is a little grim, a post-industrial grim, but the guy behind the counter is a nice guy. He shows me how to make a coffee and I talk to him in broken English about Syria. He is surprised I know anything about it. He came out to a bell I rang - like one from a hotel reception. He tells me with a smile I can have the coffee for free but I give him a tip anyway for being warm and pleasant. Each day he makes hay on a street that gives little. I wonder about his experience of the war. Down the street there is a Kabul Takeaway, and above it are windows with no glass. Four of them. Two up, two down, like a face looking down at the world. The two floors above the row of shops are abandoned. But four teeth are missing.
A convoy of cars makes me literally wait two minutes to cross the road back to the scammers. A roof is being done a few more shops down, but the corner shop has a collapsed outer wall, and the insides are exposed like a grim carcass that even the vultures have refused.
I am called in to the Model Agency and a lovely portfolio is shown to me. I am given lots of compliments and told I will do well, if I can give them 1500 pounds for the portfolio. I tell her I will not be paying for anything today. She tells me that data protection means that the portfolio cannot be stored. I tell her I need to speak to a friend. She says she will wait. I call my friend, but she texts back - in work. I text her. I tell her what is going on. She tells me that I should not give them a penny in that fashion and to get out of there. She has experience of these things. When I tell the fashion lady I will not be paying today her face turns, and she says my portfolio will be deleted. She is abrupt and dismissive. She was so nice earlier.
As I leave I wonder whether to go back in to the waiting room and tell the other potential victims. But something stops me. I feel ashamed I nearly got done and I want to get out of there.
I listen to a podcast on the way home and think of it as a learning experience. I am no fool but there was something so convincing about the fashionista. I was lucky and nearly got convinced. Such is the way of the mind. And the way of the world.
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