Fetish Guy.

Rachel and I were walking down the street near the Pret between Leicester Square and Covent Garden one day, and it was a particularly frustrating day for her because she was handing out CVs and asking for a job at all these random places. Suddenly this guy in a white office shirt and slacks and briefcase comes up to us, his formal attire offset by a large bald patch and shoulder-length hair around it. He says 'Excuse me.' We say 'Yeah?'

He says something like 'We're looking for people to take part in a study to just go around and do things like try clothes and shoes on and it'll only take a couple of hours and you can make £100-200 in a day and  it's all very simple and would you be interested?'

We've both been very flustered about our depleting money situation for some time, and I thought it was some sort of mystery shopping - which Rachel later said she thought too - so we say okay. So he starts walking with us down the street and talks about how he's experimenting with pushing the boundaries of what people feel comfortable with and says 'fetish' and 'foot' a lot of times but not making all that much sense. 

Anyway so then he asks us to take our shoes off and walk down the street barefoot for £10 each, which we happily do. It's quite nice near Covent Garden because of the cobbled streets and stuff, but a lot of people look at our feet. He then starts asking if we'd be willing to let people suck our feet, so Rachel says no and I say everything has a price. He loves my answer and asks me to expand on it a bit, but there aren't many ways I can phrase 'everything has a price'.

His next phase is to ask us to pick out clothes for each other to wear, so he takes us into some cutesy lacey store in an armpit of Covent Garden and watches us touch the clothes uneasily. He says 'I don't mean to rush you but the quicker you get done here the more money you can make doing other things' a few times. We're still quite unsure about what he wants, to we ask him again and he says he wants us to dress each other, like properly pull the clothes on each other. Which we say we don't want to do so he says okay and we leave the store.

Outside he asks what we'd do now, and since Rachel has already bowed out of having her feet sucked he focuses on me. I do think it's a bit gross, but I'm sure I've stepped in things more disgusting than someone's mouth - on that day alone from walking barefoot in Central London. I don't see why anyone would want to, but if I were getting paid for it I'm willing to detach myself enough from my feet for a couple minutes to let them be sucked. I ask him how much it would be and he says either £10 or £20, I've forgotten which since it's much too low for me anyway so we get on with our lives.  

It's very dubious and disgusting since he had no papers or whatever supporting his 'study' and didn't explain it very well at all and I didn't lose any organs or anything so it's all good, people, it's all good.