Street Sadness

Tonight I had dinner at the Italian restaurant over the road. The teenage German girl at the next table, with her family, took off her red baseball cap and began gazing at herself in the large wall mirror, and tossing her head back so that her long hair swept across my table. Her parents watched her doing this, seemingly oblivious to my grimaces, which I thought should have clearly expressed my displ easure. The last straw came when my meal arrived and her hair narrowly missed my spaghetti. I tapped her on the shoulder and asked her if she would mind not throwing her hair about. Ten minutes later she was back at it. So I flicked a generous forkful of napolitana sauce over it. She didn't feel this and continued her non-stop narcissistic preening, so I pushed the candle from the centre of my table over to the edge in the hope that she might suddenly erupt in flames, but they called for their bill and left.

As I sped along in my first class train carriage out of Manchester en route back to London, listening to the Happy Mondays on my headphones, enjoying the view and drawing some of the distinctive Manchester heads that I observed at the station before boarding the train, I suddenly thought: Life is pretty wonderful! ( One of the reasons I travel by first class rail is that, given England's proven history in this area, if there's an accident I know I'll be the first one ushered into the lifeboat.) Fifteen minutes into the journey and the very camp young Mancunian steward came round with the drinks trolley. I asked for a gin and tonic. He poured me a large one. Then he straight away poured me another large one, "Just for later, Boss", he said. At this rate, I thought, I'll be drunk before Euston! As he left he said, "I'll pop back in a bit with something you can nibble on". I assumed he meant pretzels. The Happy Mondays.

Yesterday I walked along the Whitechapel Road proudly wearing my brand new blue, white and violet check shirt, bought from Marks & Spencer . As I passed a group of school kids one of them yelled, "Goin' on a picnic, mate? Nice tablecloth!" Hilarious little bastards.

Just as I was leaving the Tate Modern an ear-splitting yell erupted from a child, "Mummy! Look at me! I'm a beautiful butterfly!" This was followed by a bellowing male voice, "Mirabelle, show Piers how you pirouette!" A family group was charging down the entry ramp towards me. Everything about them screamed Super Rich: the immaculate tailoring of the father's jacket; the high thread count of the bil lowing white cloak that fell from the mother's expensively perfumed shoulders; the way that all four of them expected us merely mortal hoi polloi to divide as they passed through us on their cloud of entitlement. The 'beautiful butterfly' turned out to be a squat, be-freckled, snub-nosed six-year-old girl. She was wearing a pink tutu and ballet slippers; in one hand she was waving a decent-sized branch, torn from one of the birch trees outside. Following her father's suggestion the plain child began her routine for her plain broth...

Spent the whole day at Tate Modern, where my sense of the importance and magnificence of art was confirmed, as it rarely is in Australia these days. The birch trees outside the building are much taller than they were on my last visit, several years ago. The amazing turbine hall entrance is shut because they are building a bridge across it, so I had to come in by a temporary side entrance which lessened the impact somewhat. But all was forgiven once I got lost in the work upstairs. Endless halls full of important masterworks. An obese teenage girl trains her iPhone camera on one of Giacometti's spindly stick figures in a perfect marriage of bulimia and anorexia. As I wandered through the galleries I suddenly realised that I had left my notebook in one of the blacked-out video rooms. It had a week's worth of my London notes in it as well as small drawings and other observations. I rushed back to the room but it was gone... Disconsolately, I went downstairs to the...

In Trafalgar Square a homeless man shuffled along with the pigeons. Barefoot and spectacularly shabby, his face was larded with dirt so engrained and so thick that his eyes seemed like blue gems shining out of coal. His hair was a solid mass of matter. Near one of Landseer's great bronze lions he got down on all fours and roared. Then he stretched out completely, on his back, as if going to sleep. His cohort of pigeons clustered around him. He reminded me of that terrifying apparition in David Lynch's Mullholland Drive , who emerges from behind a dump-master out the back of the diner; or perhaps he more closely resembled William Blake's watercolour of Nebuchadnezzar. Willam Blake's, Nebuchadnezzar , 1795.

While I was out yesterday I decided I needed to replenish the hotel soap, which, being the size of a postage stamp, was not really up to my lavish lathering requirements. So I called into a little general store off Leicester Square which had an Internet cafe attached. As I collected my purchases (soap, shampoo, bottle of water, scotch egg for later) I heard an argument developing at the counter. T wo young Balkan men were remonstrating with the Indian shopkeeper. They had just come from the Internet cafe and we're demanding their money back because, apparently, the manager of that place, "called me and him fucking cunts and go out of the shop and fuck off you fucking cunts!".... One of the young men was very attractive. The other resembled a toad. The attractive one was waving his docket and demanding the return of £10 which he had not been able to use up yet. Shopkeeper said he needed to check with the Internet man next door. He rang the man and announce...

Had a great evening down in Old Soho / Where you drink champagne / and it tastes just like cherry cola / C. O. L. A. Cola. Met the excellent Melbourne painter and lovely man, David Ralph at The French Pub, Francis Bacon's old haunt. The talk naturally turned to art and the parlous state of it in Australia. Then it was across the road for Thai food at 9.30pm. When we were thrown out of there at closing time we wandered further down Dean Street to another pub which was full of the beautiful and the raffish. The ghosts of Francis Bacon and George Dyer joined us in the corner. Francis Bacon looks down from the corner of The French, Dean Street, Soho.

Last night I walked into Waterloo for dinner. I found a nice Italian restaurant called La Barca. I ordered spatchcock with roasted vegetables and a glass of white wine (which quickly turned into two). The restaurant had obviously been there for decades as the walls were littered with signed photographs of celebrity diners such as Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, Marc Bolan and Richard Dreyfuss. Unfor tunately, there were also a dozen or so snaps of present day 'celebrities', the current crop talentless air-heads and wannabes, famous for doing and being nothing. Got into conversation with two lovely elderly ladies at the next table. They said they were sorry to hear that what appeared to be a village idiot was now prime minister of Australia. They shared some of their pre-dinner grissini with me as we awaited our dinner to arrive. A BBC presenter came in with his wife. Showing off, he attempted to order their dinner very loudly in Italian. To his obvious embarra...