Street Sadness

     Two women in their early-thirties sit at the next table, sharing their mindless psychobabble stories.      "It took me a long time to love myself," one says, "but now I do love myself and I fully acknowledge that love. And because I now love myself other people are now able to love me because it's only when we love ourselves that the love of others can enter our boundaries."      The other woman nods enthusiatically and reaches across the tabl e to grasp her friend's hands with a wide, affirming smile. The friend continues.      "I wish I knew the importance of self-love years ago, because I'd probably be in a successful relationship by now. But for the rest of my life I know that I am the most important person in my life. I try not to deny myself anything that I want. If I feel like buying something, I buy it. When I meet a new guy for the first time I think to myself, what can I get out of this person which will n...

     I caught a bus to an area with which I was unfamiliar. I wandered around the streets looking for photo opportunities. It was a world of cracked concrete, and broken glass, and mucous-larded pavements, and no prospects. The lead-grey sky draped itself heavily over the tracts of council houses and flats. No birds were to be seen in the barren trees: they'd clearly long ago given the area up as a bad joke.      I walked across a small concrete square which was glossy from a recently passing shower. It was ringed with tiny, beaten up shops, which were all locked for the weekend, some with metal screens and chains. A dozen or so local women, wearing hijabs, walked across the square, individually or in pairs, their dark eyes sweeping before them, as inscrutable and unknowable as their husbands could wish them to be. I looked past them down one of the roads and saw four mid-teenage boys; one of them had a smaller boy in a headlock and the rest were spitting ...

    Yesterday I went to see the enormous Paul Nash survey show at Tate Britain. I have liked some of Nash's work when I've seen it occasionally over the years. But seeing all of his work together in such abundance did little to assure me of his major status. His  artistic shortcomings were all suddenly revealed - such as his over-reliance on certain colours and colour systems across his entire career, or his preference for outlining shapes in black - which obviously stemmed from his earlier training as an illustrator (some of his student illustrations were on display, and they reveal him to have been of average talent in this area).       His experiences during the war clearly gave him the subject which defines his work in British memory, and here there are plenty of crashed German fighter planes; soldiers caught in the horrible trenches of No Man's Land; and shell-blasted hell-scapes of shattered trees and bomb craters to satisfy the most sentimenta...

     A family shambles into the pub, all dressed in black. It comprises a set of obese twins, one of whom is the mother of a boy and a girl aged about eight and nine.       "My god", she says to the barman, "I need a fuckin' drink after the day I've 'ad." She orders for the entire entourage and they all sit around three tables, which they hastily drag together. The woman now spots me in the corner and she galumphs over on unsteady, knock-kneed legs, with a plaintive look across her pale, doughy face.     "'Scuse me luv, can I take summer dese chairs?" She gestures to the three empty seats around my table. I tell her she can. "Only, I cremated me muvver dis mornin'. " she says, apropos of nothing. I give her my condolences.       She seats her two children on tall stools at the bar. Another family member arrives with two bags of McDonald's food. He places these in front of the kids, who eagerly dig in. The adults sit ad...

     A large, middle-aged woman with a harried, drooping face and long hair which was once blonde sits with two of her friends in a Hackney cafe. She has just ordered a Sunday lamb roast, but she insisted on extra gravy, because "I need to have the extra juiciness to make the roast potatoes nice and gooey on the palate". She now holds court in a braying voice that rings around the cafe.       "My damned father will never answer my damned text messages and by the time he does damn well answer them I can't remember what I'd damn well said to him, the absolute pig... He sits in that damned house like Lord Muck and expects everyone to damn well run around after him, but will he lift a damn finger or make a damned effort? not on your bloody life."       Her friends nod in well-established silence. Finally, one of them dares to speak.      "I read the other day about a woman my age - 64 - who has just had a baby." ...

    Over the last few weeks our house has become the fashionable holiday resort of the fruit fly. They have decided that our kitchen is their Crimea and here they drift in slow motion: tiny hang-gliders held aloft on miasmic thermals of vegetable-gases, alighting wherever fancy takes them,     "Ooh! Stan! There's a lovely vile vapour emanating from that fruit bowl! Shall we settle there and luxuriate in the over-ripe ooze?"      At first, we didn't much notice them; they are small and silent. But within a week we had become the Fruit Fly Butlins: aunts and uncles, nieces and cousins, brothers and sisters soon all arrived, intent on enjoying their two-day lifecycle in the balmy Utopia of our kitchen.      Like cockroaches, the fruit fly seems to have an iron-constitution. Yesterday, as I took a bowl of steaming, home-made pumpkin soup from the microwave oven, I was shocked to see three of the little creatures drift out, too. They had b...