Inside London Flash Mob ##4
Global Flash Mob

This was the world's first global flashmob with mobbers participating in a multitude of cities around the world. I don't know what they were doing in all the other cities but our explicit instructions were delivered in advance. We were to be in Covent Garden Piazza at the Russel Street end, not later than 10 past 2 milling around acting casual.




Then at quarter past we had to walk briskly in a clockwise direction around the piazza (fortunately HS accompanied me because I always have a hell of a job figuring out which direction that is, and my brain seems to automatically work counter-clockwise).







There was to be no running but it was important to keep up with the mobber in front. As we passed each corner we were to greet other mobbers with a jaunty "Hello, I'm pleased to meet you!", or alternatively you could say the same in Spanish, French, Polish, Italian, Mandarin, Korean or Russian - all helpfully supplied with the phonetic pronunciation. HS and I desperately tried to swot up on the bus on the way to the rendevous but being hopeless at learning languages I was lucky to learn the word for hello (most of the European ones I knew already) in some of them. So I tried to combine I'm pleased to meet you with a different hello at each corner. Someone decided to shake hands and that seemed like a good way to complete the greeting.

In ten minutes we managed to get almost twice round the piazza. I tried to walk at different paces to the mobbers around me so I wasn't saying hello to the same people all the time. Reporters and photgraphers ran round like mad things. One reporter with a cameraman demanded I restage one of the greetings, which felt a little pointless and a bbc london reporter asked for an interview which went something like: tell me what you are doing here, why have you given up your time today, haven't you got anything better to do with your time?

HS over heard a tourist from out of town saying, what are all these people doing, oh they must be tourists. And a man in a superman outfit had started to get rather excited by the number of people fast approaching his show only to be disappointed when they marched on by.

So Global Flash Mob was rather less exciting than the other two I have attended. Something to do with the fact that there seemed to be fewer participants, they were strung out over a massive area and therefore didn't seem to be able to make the same impact as before and there were fewer opportunities for interaction with other mobbers therefore making people shy of following the instructions (not many people greeted me and the corners were not noisy with the racket of people greeting one another). And Covent Garden is already crowded with people so much so that the mob crowd was barely visible. We cheered, clapped, jumped up and down and left without turning back.

And so in comtemplation of what the reporter asked me, because I doubt my on-the-spot answers were terribly informative, I think the answers are: I was taking part in a global event of flashmobbing, greeting strangers in a freindly manner in other languages if possible; I enjoy the idea of being part of a 'happening' or performance art (something we don't have much opportunity to do), the previous ones have been great fun for a very short amount of time; since the event only lasts 10 minutes and I would generally be in the West End anyway it is relatively little time to give up or waste really.

Read diamond geezer's report.
Read reports of New York's Flash Mobs by Satan's Laundromat (it started here).