Tuesday 4 December 2007

Note to whoever

I always enjoy running a little "blog project", whether it's you sending me pictures of your eyes or your legs.

This one though is a little more ambitious.

Every day in London distributors hand out tens of thousands of free newspapers to commuters. Sometimes you can get into a Tube carriage that is completely littered with free papers.

I always wonder who picks them up and reads them - and where does one of the papers begin its journey and where does it end?

So, while sitting on the Central Line this morning I came up with an experiment.

I am going to write a little note on a page in one of these free sheets, leave it on the train and hope that someone else picks it up and responds to it.

It's the modern-day equivalent of putting notes in bottles and dropping them into the ocean. This morning I left two newspapers on two different London Underground lines.

The first was a copy of The Times that I bought to read.

Bobby's newspapersThis (above) is the copy I left on a Westbound Central Line train to Ealing Broadway.

This is the little message I wrote in it:

Bobby's newspapersThe second newspaper I wrote a note on, I left on a Northbound Jubilee line train to Wembley Park.

Bobby's newspapersI really hope that someone finds these and gets in touch. Wouldn't it be the funniest thing?

Please, if you've come to this blog because you've picked up one of the newspapers I've left on a train, please drop me an e-mail or leave a comment.

Secondly, if one of you in London finds one of these newspapers, that would be the biggest fluke! Maybe a prize could be offered like a meal out or free sex?

Who knows who's out there? And who may get in touch. It's like putting little bits of niceness into the Universe and hoping that someone responds.

I wonder just who is out there...

4 comments:

ANDRE said...

I hate you. You always come up with the greatest ideas a couple of minutes before I do!

As you know I was in London until yesterday, and I was going to do a very similar experiment for my blog. I want to use post-it notes, it's something I've done for my clothing brand here in Italy and it worked pretty well!

Next time I'll be in London (one month from now, apparently) I'll start cruising for newspapers then.. It's a bit like book-crossing tho..

(by the way, you should do it with copies of QX magazine - you pick them up, write down your blog address and pile them back before some huge dude from security will kick your ass)

MadeInScotland said...

hey Bob, I hardly ever get the tube. If you start leaving them on buses for me...

ahoj

London Preppy said...

I wanted to do the same thing when I was in Iceland. I intended to print out flyers with my blog address and leave them in cafes etc, because I'm desperate for Icelandic readers. Then I forgot.

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of the old summer fete competition as a child, where you used to pay to have your details tagged to a helium balloon, and the one that got the furthest won the prize.

Are you allowed to drop bottles into the Thames or does that count as littering?

Other things you could try - writing it on toilet rolls and then rewrapping them up (you never know it could end up being one of the toilet rolls LP steals from various locations), or for more of a gay vibe - stickers on condoms in gay bars.

If you want to make it easier for yourself with your "grafitti"- get yourself a free domain with a forwarder on it - then you don't have to worry about the .blogspot thing as well, and people are more likely to remember to type it in.