Street Sadness

    This morning I walked from my flat across Vauxhall Bridge, to my bank in Victoria, to arrange my rent payment. It was a beautiful, crisp morning and all of the puddles along the way had become sheets of ice that crunched underfoot. Fallen leaves in the gutters were frosted in white.   The air felt pleasantly like burning ice in my chest and my breath drifted white in front of my face.     Leaving the bank, I went into a cafe for a late breakfast. It was stuffed with tourists. A buff young Australian buck was sitting with his girlfriend, talking loudly to a young Finnish guy.   “Yeah, we was fucken smashed for three fucken weeks, mate! Fucken beer, fucken whiskey, tequila, fucken shots, the lot! We were fucken legends!” His girlfriend joined in.    “Fuck! We were fucken alcohol zombies for the whole fucken trip! Amazing!” The Finnish guy thought for a bit and then said,     “Did you guys met Andrea when she was here...

After braving the tourist Christmas horde in Oxford Street this morning, I stupidly entered the first coffee shop I found. I was served by what I assumed to be a nine year old girl, but she could have been a short young woman. Most unfortunately, this establishment turned out to be a Starbucks, a fact that I didn't realise until I had sat down with what was supposed to pass as my 'coffee' and looked up to see the most hideous mural scrawled on a blackboard: it featured a mermaid (evidently their trade mark image); she wore a crown on her very badly-drawn head. It is the first time in my entire life that I have ever been in one of their stinking establishments, and I apologise to readers of this who are more socially-and-ecologically-conscious than I happened to be on this one single occasion - forgive me! I bravely had two sips of the swill that foamed in the cardboard cup on my table. It was possibly the worst 'coffee' I have ever had the misfortune to pass between...

    It was 11am  and I sat in the cafe down the road from my flat with my regular morning mug of tea steaming on the table before me. It  has become my habit to visit this establishment every day for my breakfast. It  is run by three Polish sisters. Two of these young women are very friendly. But on this occasion I had been served by the third, surly one - let's call her Zofia. She had stood staring at me from the other side of the counter, stony-faced and pallid as the grave. As usual, she was wearing extravagant false eyelashes which emphasised her ethereal mien and made her look just a little bit insane. She looks as if she has never laughed in her entire life - never so much as smiled - as if she carries the entire weight of her people's tragic heritage on her shoulders.      "Yes, pliz." she demanded, blankly. I made my order and sat at the table facing the window, the better to watch life's passing parade. Outside, people were braced again...

    I was walking in the city. It was only 4 o’clock but the winter evening was already closing in. People scurried through the streets finishing up their business and their Christmas shopping for the day, before the rush hour took hold. It was very cold and our every breath hung before us in misty vapour. Despite my jacket I felt the implacable chill skewer my core. My ears were stinging from the frosty air; they were raw and when I rubbed them my hands felt red-hot.     In a wide doorway, to my left, two homeless English boys, around fifteen or sixteen years of age, had set up a temporary nest. They may have been brothers, or perhaps they had once been just strangers thrown together by fate as they tramped along the mean pavements. It was hard to tell because the street had moulded them into a generic abjection. They sat on an elderly, dirty-pink eiderdown and they had two blankets which they were now pulling up over their scrawny legs. There were a few ba...

   I entered the ravishingly sumptuous but, let's face it, preposterously eccentric Moorish entrance hall of Frederick Lord Leighton's house in Holland Park. The beautiful wall tiles were as I remembered them from my previous visits, as was the shallow pool, with its gently tinkling, central waterspout. Incongruously, the lovely floor tiles had been muffled, here and there, by four cheap-looking Turkish-style mats, which would never have graced the room in Leighton's day: I wondered what possible logic lay behind this intervention, but could think of no answer. It was as if the management of the house had decided that the sumptuous beauty of the room - with its peacock-blue vases and its peacock-green dishes, and its Moorish tiles and its gorgeous filtered light was not sufficiently Victorian and so they had upped the ante by troweling on even more of the decorative kitsch, Disney-style. It was superfluous, but the public - at least the dozen or so pensioners who were shuff...

I was very excited to go this morning to hear the great German artist Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy talk about his work. I had seen this wonderful exhibition four times already, so I was really looking forward to hearing about the ideas and processes behind it. The morning ended sourly, however, due to the staff’s very poor management of the event and one other major problem - the sound system. We all crowded into the foyer of the beautiful building to register at the front desk with our tickets. We then joined the end of a long queue which stretched into the far side of the foyer. People were chatting happily and there was an air of good-natured camaraderie in the group. We continued to wait in line as more and more people arrived. These new arrivals apparently did not care to join the queue. Instead, they hung around at the foot of the stairs in front of us in an untidy, chattering rabble. There were no helpful ropes set up to cordon people into a manageable line...

I have read a great deal about the Nazi period and I have seen a lot of documentary film footage about this evil. But I was completely shocked and surprised by my emotional reaction to the exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum about the Holocaust. The exhibition is staged across eight or nine rooms on the fourth floor of the building. It is, appropriately, dimly lit. It consists of photographs, film footage, objects and audio recordings of survivors. In the first room there are films of happy, prosperous Jews in Germany in the years before the war: here they are in parks, at functions, in family groups. They are laughing and touching and kissing and hugging and eating and drinking and having the time of their lives. All this was to change. Very quickly.   In the next room we see images of the pathetic Austrian, the failed artist, just released from prison for plotting to overthrow the government. His time had now arrived. His day had dawned. He spoke well. The ...

An American mother and daughter sit next to me in Tate Britain cafe. The daughter is telling her mother about a course she has just been on.    "So the whole point of the course was to teach the stoodent how to discuss things in a group and how to listen and it's really cool because you all sit around a big table so the teacher is on the same level as the stoodents and then we learn how to speak to the other stoodents and how to bring other stoodents into the conversation and how to not talk for too long and how to keep to the topic and it was really cool but then when I went to the Oxford classes the whole thing was completely different and the classes are like lectures with the teacher at the front of the class and all the stoodents sitting in rows in front of him and so it's like a two hour lecture and it was just listening to the teacher for two hours and I think it should be toadally different and maybe the teacher talks for one hour and then you have a one hour ...

Tonight, Chrissie, Ivan and I are at this moment sitting in their apartment in Hackney with the front lights turned off in the hope that the over-privileged children who are now parading up and down the street dressed as pumpkins and witches, with their mothers, trick or treating, don't come to the door. In case any of the more intrepid ones do take the chance, we have water boiling on the stove and big syringes which can send steaming jets through the letterbox into their eager, upturned, ghostly faces. It will be 'Straw Dogs' all over again.

On the tube train into Victoria this morning I stood next to a young muslim man. He was bearded, naturally, and he wore a suit jacket made from three separate fabrics of varying shades of dark blue. The arms were of serge, the yoke was denim, as were the elbow patches, and the main body of the garment was a gently glistening nylon. He wore black nylon trousers. Each of his tan, vinyl loafers was held in place by a green and red striped band that ran over the top of each foot and attached to an elaborate golden clasp. He had a discrete black mole on the very tip of his nose. He was standing, eyes down, reading the Quran, which nestled in a special leather wallet. His lips moved silently as he read and re-read the beautiful curling tendrils of the script on the page. He stood in the midst of the commuters and never once looked up from his book between the nine stations of his journey. I looked around the carriage at the other travellers. A plump woman with over-sized spectacles, wearin...

On the Central Line tube this morning I stood next to a man in his mid-thirties. It was after rush hour so the carriage was not too crowded. The man inspected his hands carefully, one after the other. He seemed mesmerised by them as he turned them this way and that, holding them close to his face. I noticed that on his left palm he had a severe, livid case of eczema that spread across the base of his thumb and around his wrist like a crusty bracelet. He began to gingerly probe this with his right index finger. Then he began to delicately scratch at the edges of the afflicted area with his fingernail. I turned away, rather repulsed, as the scurf-dust fell away. Two stations later I happened to glance back at the man, who was now emboldened in his task and was furiously peeling great flakes of sloughed skin off his hand and flicking them away, out onto the carriage floor. Stepping over the sheets of  his derma-slag I got out at the next station and carefully checked my shoes for any ...

It is Sunday afternoon in late October and the London days are beginning to show their age. People in the street have started to wear scarves and coats as things start to chill. I sit in a small local restaurant waiting for my lunch to be served. Behind me two girls in their mid-twenties are having a heated argument about the Beatles’ song,    “I think you’ll find that it is ‘Eleanor Risby’!”    “No! Just think about it! Helena Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her man.” I rolled my eyes and tune them out. Across from me two young gay men, clearly on a first date, are nervously skirting around the business of talking themselves up. The one with sandy blonde hair says to the Vietnamese one,    “So, I always thought that if I could be the first to introduce a vegetable to another country that had never seen it before I could be like Sir Walter Raleigh with his potatoes”. A chubby six-year-old gaily trips around the room in her Sunday ...

For dinner I tried an Indian restaurant near where I am staying. Through the large plate glass window I could see a tall Indian waiter standing to attention next to a tiny bar at the end of the room. As I pushed the door open he strode towards me with a beaming grin.   "Hello, sir. Good evening sir. Would you like a table? Is it for one, sir?" He ushered me to a table in the corner, next to the bar. He brought me a menu, which seemed complete and very reasonably priced. I ordered the Lamb Sag, some plain rice and a bottle of Indian beer. He took the order down the creaky stairs to the kitchen below. As I waited for my meal to arrive I looked around at my surroundings.  It was early so I was the only customer. There were eight tables, set with expensive-looking, very tacky chairs - stretched white leather over chrome-look, bendy metal frames. Set into the bar, low to the ground, was a large fish tank containing two happy-looking goldfish that swam eternal figure-e...

It was lovely to catch up last night with dear friends P. and M. before they head back to Australia. We first met in the late 1970s at The Victorian College of the Arts, in Melbourne, when we were all just babies. The venue for the evening was Drummond Street, Euston, for a great Indian meal at Taste of India (delicious food and handsome, friendly staff). Much hilarity ensued as we reminisced about the wonderful, anarchic, art-student days of the Punk era, which we all agreed were the golden years of our liv es. A few of the items on the evening's agenda were as follows: driving down Hoddle Street and everyone is completely off their chops on LSD - the road was writhing like a Van Gogh painting;  the girl on speed who threatened people with a tiny metal earring shaped like a dagger which she took out of her ear for the purpose; someone sets a boat on fire in a Richmond street - it explodes; a dozen eggs smashed into the Richmond public letterbox; a friend makes a frantic dash to th...

(Names Changed to Protect the Guilty) The two-year-old I was babysitting waited up for its parents to arrive home, having stubbornly refused to lie down and listen to bedtime stories and who was seemingly immune to the 'Grumpy Uncle' routine I had adopted for the tedious occasion. In that case, I reasoned, it could damn-well sit in silence beside me on the couch while I watched dozens of Louis CK clips on YouTube via the wide-screen television. This it did, whilst feeding its face with the crunchy, deep-fried confections that its mother firmly believed were a 'healthy option' because they were 'vegetarian'. It also guzzled milk from a plastic, spouted cup. At 11.45 pm the parents arrived home. The child looked up at them as they came through the door and immediately expelled a jet of projectile vomit out into the room and over its clothes and the couch we were sitting on. It began to grizzle. The mother immediately snatched the dripping bundle up to her bo...

A young builder standing with three others on the pavement outside a house they are renovating. He is talking about a problematic fourth member of their crew who is not present.    "So, 'e's upstairs yellin' at Charlie on 'is fuckin' phone, an' it's fuckin' this an' fuckin' that an' fuckin' the uvver fing. An' there's a fuckin' family downstairs an' they're listenin' to all this fuckin' palaver. I says to 'im, later, I says, You can't talk like that in someone's 'ouse cos they'll get the 'ump and complain."    "That's right", replies another of the builders, "You gotta be respeckful in that situration".    "But the thing is", the first builder continued, "after I says all this to 'im, 'e got the 'ump wiv me  and he stormed out of the 'ouse and he slammed the front door and all the glass all smashed. So it only goes to sh...

    At lunchtime I went into the South American cafe down the road in Hackney. I had just ordered my meal when a man came in, ushering his twelve-year-old daughter before him. By the father's over-solicitous conversation and body language it soon became obvious that he was a divorced weekend-dad who didn't see his daughter as much as he would have liked. This, then, was a special lunch treat. She was a slightly chubby blonde girl with a pleasant face. She wore sparkly blue nail varnish and had her hair braided into a plait for the occasion. He stared lovingly and intently at her whenever he asked her a question. I was a little surprised to feel tears begin to prick my eyes at the lovely way they were both trying really hard to please each other on this special day out together. They walked to the table opposite me. He asked her whether she would like to face the window. She told him that he should decide. He allowed her the seat with the view.     They sca...

I was a little early for an appointment to meet a friend in Vauxhall, so I called in to The Black Prince for a few pints and to while away an hour. As I stood at the bar a  dapper gent in his late-fifties, to my right, was engaged in conversation with the young Italian barmaid. He was half-cut, but still quite lucid,   "So there were only four or five books that you wanted? Out of the hundred I showed you?"   "Yes, I think that's enough, you know?"   "Oh, alright, but I really don't think you will like that last one on your list."   "Why not?"   "Well, Phillip Roth is a very good writer, but that one is about a young man ... and masturbation!" I realised that he was talking about Roth's terrific Jewish guilt novel, 'Portnoy's Complaint'.    "You surely wouldn't want to read about that, would you?" The girl shrugged and said she thought it sounded interesting. I turned to the man and said,   ...