Street Sadness

    A teenaged girl and her boyfriend got on the train at Strood station. She had a black beehive hair-do. He had a greasy, brown, almost-mullet. Her face was pancaked in makeup, which didn't quite conceal the very dark freckles that spattered her face beneath. He just looked ill and grey.     "Anyway", she said, "I can't go to Andrea's berfdee, can I? What if Dave's there, too, and it all kicks off again?"     "He wouldn't dare do nuffin' wiv orla us there, though, would 'e?", said the grey teen.     "But you lot ain't bin invited, 'av yer?", she went on, "Kyle pacifically said pacifically you wasn't to come, and that's that, in all honesty".     "Bollocks", said the cadaver, "'Ow's 'e gonna stop all of us gettin' in? I'd like to know. Cos, there'll be about a dozen if Chris and all them lot decide to go". The girl thought for a bit, and then s...

    I wandered in to a tiny pub and sat at a table with a pint of Spitfire. The lanky young barman who had served me walked over to the barmaid who was busy at the till and squashed his pelvis up against her ample backside.     "Ooh, this is cosy", he said.     "Do you mind!? ", she retorted, shoving back her rump in order to push him away.     "Oh, keep going, keep going, I'm almost there", he said. Another young barmaid arrived for work. She began rubbing her neck vigorously, complaining of having hay fever.     "I've been itching like fuck all day", she said to the lanky young barman, "Kelly gave me some of them hay fever pills. Anti-hammerstein or something. But they ain't working".     After a second Spitfire I meandered along the village cobbles. Outside an antique shop sat the proprietor, a grizzled woman in her sixties. A fat black Labrador lay at her feet, staring at its front paws in...

    I got talking tonight on the train with three young men returning home from a solid day of drinking. One was almost legless. They were all very funny and very friendly. They only began including me in their conversation when I laughed out loud at something unrepeatable that one of them said. After that they tried to outdo each other in their hilarious comments, for my benefit. Just before they got off the train they asked where I was going. I told them and one said to the others, "That's where Jerry got stabbed in the eye." I must have looked a little taken aback, so he reassured me, "Oh, it's alright, it was his friend what done it." Then they each shook my hand, said goodbye and left the carriage. Diamond geezers one and all.

    Sitting in the Physic Garden in Faversham. It is a beautiful summer day: the birds and bees are in full swing and the flowers are in full bloom. A very tall man wearing a white vest and brown trousers attends to the garden as his children play nearby: a young boy with a tearaway's face and a gangly nine-year-old girl who insists on doing cartwheels around the tables so that everyone sitting having their tea and cake can admire her knickers, presumably. I had taken an instant dislike to her earlier on, when she had arrogantly corrected an old biddy volunteer, who was telling us that a large tract of the garden had been there since Medieval times.    "You mean Mega evil, actually!" she insisted, with a toss of her smug little head.     At one stage the young boy ran along the stone pathway and out of sight behind some flowering bushes. His flapping footsteps resounded through the idyllic setting, then they abruptly stopped as he fell...

    Having lunch in a cafe close to where I am staying, I sat at a table next to a father and his son, who was about sixteen-years-old. At one point the father leant across the table and stared into the boy's eyes and said, "I know what you are like, Craig. You find any hole and you just stick it in". It took me a little while to work out that he was actually referring to the boy's deficient room-tidying abilities.

    The village of Faversham was a centre for the oyster trade, probably since the Roman era. Today, this activity has been transmogrified into its quintessentially urban variety. As I walk down the machine-cut cobbles of the town centre, large, glistening pavement oysters gleam throughout the streets. They are as fat and succulent as any to have graced the silver platters of a Praetorian prefect. Some of these grey-green gobbets rest as they have landed, all pristine and ovoid. Others have had their integrity interrupted by the rubber tip of the oldsters’ walking sticks so that snail-trails are swiped from the central mucoid mass. Still others have been mashed into the ground by an orthopaedic shoe or a chav’s trainer, so that several identical but gradually fading impressions of the original are Xeroxed along the pavement following the trajectory of the pedestrians’ perambulations. I have always had the utmost difficulty in suppressing the gag reflex when dining on...

Old lady speaking to her middle-aged daughter on the Tube yesterday: "She's a sick, sick cow, that's what we refer to her as now."

    I boarded the crowded rush hour tube train at Sloane Square. Managed to slip into a seat just vacated by an exiting passenger. At the next station three young men got on and stood in the doorway opposite me. They were builders, fresh from work, wearing plaster-spattered work clothes. Two were quite nice looking; the third was an absolute blinder. Shaggy black hair, coal black eyes, a three day growth. I wondered if he could be Irish. This was later confirmed when at the next station he turned to one of the others and spoke in an Irish accent. In fact they were all Irish. His companions were clearly straight, but his eyes gave him away completely as they flicked and darted over the men sitting on the seats, or entering the train at each station. From my seated position I watched him rapidly gauge and appraise. Several times early on in the journey his eyes met mine and in the manner of such gay transactions we held each other's gaze fractionally longer than necessary -...

    Trafalgar Square. Slate grey clouds roll across the sky like dark tripe. The tourist horde wanders aimlessly across the Square, flashing their iPhones at each other. The tamest pigeons in the entire world strut at my feet, heedless of potential kicks. The four giant bronze lions recline like Sphinxes, four-square, in their positions around the column, as they have for over a hundred years. The air is warm. Far down below our feet the Tube trains rush through the Victorian tunnels, ferrying passengers across town. White buildings, all around us, which have been in these exact places for centuries, their impassive facades looking down at the passing parade of humanity. And what dramas have unfolded within their rooms? What sorrows? What happiness? What lives? What deaths? And what more is to come? And how long will they remain here?     The sound of long-ago bombs echoes through time across the Square. I picture the fire in the sky; the roar of plummetin...

In the National Portrait Gallery I found this lovely little marble bust of Mary Anne Clarke, made by Lawrence Gahagan in 1811.   The information tag said: ‘from 1803 – 1809 Mary Anne Clarke was mistress of Frederick, Duke of York. Their affair turned into a political scandal when the Duke was charged with corruption for promoting officers from whom Clarke had taken bribes. Renounced by the Duke, Clarke wrote her own revealing memoirs and extracted huge sums from the government to suppress them’. Of course, if it had happened today, they’d probably quietly arrange an accident for her in a Paris tunnel.

   In the National Portrait Gallery bookshop I was suddenly assailed by the smug, fake-pious face of Margaret Thatcher sneering out at me from the cover of the 'authorised' biography. Something primal took over and without thinking twice I took a black marker pen from my shirt pocket, and making as though I was reaching for an adjacent book, I managed to add a lot of bold scribbles to the book jacket, completely obliterating the horrible face she had for so long presented to the world. The enormous satisfaction that this afforded me is hard to accurately describe.      A little later, upstairs in one of the galleries, I briefly toyed with the idea of administering the same corrections to Rodrigo Moynihan's awful, syrupy portrait of the old bag, but a guard was posted nearby. Perhaps other people had come close to the same actions lately.

   Three gangly, teenage American girls spread out and clomped around the wooden floors of the National Portrait Gallery in their chunky boot heels, loudly calling out to each other about the portraits in the Elizabethan rooms.     "Lookit this guy! He's so cool! Look at his beard. So hipster. I LOVE it!"     "Oh wow! This woman is, like, ancient. Check out that bling!"     "He's, like, a king or some shit! Lookit his hat! " I sought to escape them by slipping into another room, but they followed me in. This room contained a group of young schoolchildren who were sitting on the floor quietly listening to a lady Gallery guide explain to them the beautiful portrait of Henry IV. The three girls seemed completely oblivious to this, and they edged around the room still shouting out their observations on the people in the paintings.     "Gahd! that looks like that dude in that movie, you know who I mean?" ...

    I walked into a small pub for lunch and then realised that I didn't have any money with me, so I turned to walk out, intending to return after visiting the bank. As I walked past the bar the young barmaid turned, incredulous, to an ancient crone perched on a stool like a Norn on a rock and said, "Woss 'is game, then?" I decided to eat elsewhere.     So I then found myself in another Tudor doll's house where I ordered the potato and leek soup. As I waited, an elderly woman tottered in and sat at the bar    "'Ow you doin' then, Rosie?" said the barman.     "Oh, not so good, luv ... 'ad trouble with me waterworks for weeks now." The barmaid brought out my thimbleful of scalding soup and placed it before me on the tiny, crumb-speckled table. She then went behind the bar and old Rosie said,    "Got some lovely veal up the butchers yesterdee. Ooh it was nice."    "Don't know 'ow you can eat that muck...

I took my seat in the pub named The Bear. Two large men in their fifties were sitting at the bar with pints of bitter before them. One of them possessed a gut you could park a Mini Cooper in. His companion was not quite as large, but was still sturdily built: he was totally bald and he had shaved his eyebrows off, the better to display the lurid tattooed flames that were licking over his forehead. In fact, the entirety of his head and neck was thus inkily illustrated. These tongues of stylised red and blue  flames pitchforked their way up the centre of his massive head and swept around to threaten the shield of a famous football club that had been expertly etched into his left temple; I imagine he must have had a similar shield on his right, too, as everything possessed a methodical central axis symmetry. The entirety of his dome was a writhing abstract maelstrom of red, blue and green swirls and darts. His large beak of a nose was also fully illustrated: it had a little tableau of...

    Weaving down the tiny Faversham street, past the oldsters with their walking frames, walking sticks and in their electric wheely-bins, I found a little cafe for lunch. I crawled on my belly and elbows in through the one-foot high doorway and perched myself onto one of the minute doll chairs inside. The waitress came to the table and I ordered the moussaka. She looked at me as if I was retarded and then (in)corrected me.     "So, you'd like the Mow-sakki, would you?"     As I waited I looked out of the postage stamp window at the now-familiar ancients shuffle-creeping along the road. The meal arrived. She placed it in front of me.     "Ooh, I'll bring you a piece of bread so you can mop up all that lovely gravy". She was referring to the one-inch of orange-coloured oil that floated in the bowl over the large lumps of grey eggplant. My tepid coffee was then brought to the table in what appeared to be a tall flower vase, complet...

Overheard a man in the street this morning: "Little lamb, woof woof woof! Little lamb, Grrr!" I briefly wondered if it might be a new one from Paul McCartney.

   At the Faversham train station a cluster of policemen and railway security huddled conspiratorially around a couple of station attendants, the female one of whom said, "It was just a bit of a shock. It was so quick. He just pulled it out with no warning. I mean, who wants to look at that? Urgh!"    A bit later, as I sat awaiting the train into London, a heavy-set woman with a tattoo of Mariah Carey on her calf, and a baby in a pram, sat next to me and rang someone on her iPhone.         "Allo, iss me. No I'm stuck in fuckin' Faversham, ain' I?... Worse case snario, I'll get there in two fuckin' hours, ok dullin? See ya sweetheart."

   Walking through the village of Faversham for the train station, I came upon a small group of oldsters huddled around a blackbird in the gutter. It had apparently flown into a shop window and now, here it was, zonked and startled, on the cobbles. An old woman said, "Oh, bless its heart, the poor love". It sat there in its stupour with its bright yellow beak agape. I continued on to the ATM machine  and when I returned a man was crouching beside the stricken creature, stroking its head with his forefinger. It didn't move. The same old woman as before said, "Oh, bless!".. All of a sudden, the man shot his hand out and grabbed the wretched bird. It issued a wild squawking that continued loudly as the man carried it back inside his shop. Probably going to make a delicious pie or something for later on. Country ways, and all that.

Memories from a twenty-six hour plane flight - Memo to passengers in airplane toilets: if you must  urinate on the walls, floor, toilet seat and ceiling, please clean it up before you leave the cubicle. It took me half an hour to mop it all up with bundles of toilet paper so that the person waiting outside wouldn't think that I had made the mess.

Yesterday in a cafe in the city a young Anglo Indian family struggled to take a group photograph on the father's iPhone. He held the phone aloft as they squeezed together trying to fit into the frame. I watched them for a while and then offered to take the picture for them. I took the iPhone and knelt on the floor. They formed into a relaxed, smiling huddle as I squinted at the little plastic scre en. I said, "One, Two, Three", and pressed the unresponsive button. I pressed it again. And again. Finally the images seemed to be taken and I handed the iPhone back. As I walked away the mother said, "What a nice man to do that for us". But as I took my seat across the room I realised that I had not brought my glasses out with me, and that the photographs had been taken by guess work. And, as I looked at the horrified, incredulous look on the father's face as he flipped through the 'images' I had 'composed', I could only imagine the carnage I had w...

At Liverpool Street station a pigeon flutters down from the roof and lands nearby and, because it has no feet, it slides along the polished stone floor on its grotesque pink nubbins and crashes into a tourist's suitcase.

In Pimlico this afternoon I came upon a heated argument between a council worker and an elderly woman who had stopped to remonstrate with him about something, I never worked out exactly what. He was in his mid-forties. She was dressed expensively, but eccentrically, in a very long beige woollen jacket that finished in six pointed flaps at her ankles - it also had a long pointed collar; on her feet  she wore some sort of Persian slippers, also pointed; and her long, unkempt grey hair tumbled on either side of her furious, wrinkled face from under a beige, felt hat. Exasperated, the worker brought an abrupt end to the altercation and as he walked off he said, "Oright, Gandalf, keep yer 'air on!" ... It still makes me laugh, even all these hours later, to recall it.

On the train back to London, with The Beat singing 'Sooner Or Later' on my headphones, I eagerly awaited the arrival of the refreshments trolley. It always makes me feel a little like a grown up when the waiters ask if there is anything you would like, Sir? Today it was a cuddly Italian man in his early-thirties named 'Johnny', as the black plastic letters on his white plastic badge proclaimed. Immediately, as our eyes met, our combined, finely-tuned Gaydar flashed across the heavens in acknowledgement, like a sluttish pinball machine. I ordered a coffee. He asked if I wanted any milk or sugar? I said Yes, and Yes. He gave me a level look for a second and, after a significant pause, then said, "And would you like me to put it in for you?" I smiled and said, "Yes, please, that would be lovely". And then he said, "And will there be something gooey to follow?" He gave a cursory nod to the chocolates displayed on the trolley, but we bot...

Every so often I see people in London who could have stepped straight out of the historical paintings on show here. Such as the woman in her mid-sixties who is sitting across from me, here in the Tate Britain cafe. Her long brown hair frames a long pale Stuart-era face and her heavy-lidded eyes could have come from any of the paintings by the great Peter Lely, upstairs. And then my reverie is br oken by the officious, bustling, tiny weasel of a cafe manager, who keeps skittering around people's tables like a bumblebee, performing tasks which are completely unnecessary. I know this kind of manager well - the sort who can't help meddling into the well-functioning ship his staff have created, and in the process steering it onto the rocks. I couldn't help smiling when he grabbed a woman's teapot, thinking it was empty, sloshing a little scalding tea on his hand.

So, at midnight last night I strolled down to The Eagle in Kennington Lane. Cubs and bears predominate here and what a great-looking scruffy, furry, growly, friendly crowd it was. I watched the guys playing pool for an hour or two and then lost it on the dance floor. I'm not usually big on House music, but in certain chemically-induced states one will dance to anything, even the chug chug chug of a washing machine. Wandered home at 5.30 in the morning to the glorious sounds of the birds waking up.

Wandered down into the village of Faversham, with its many tiny buildings from the 1500s. A terrifying number of oldsters zombie-shuffled about on the newly-cobbled tourist-streets with walking sticks or in their one-man electric wheely-bins. Several jug-jawed chav girls loitered in front of an off-licence. A old man dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear stood in front of another shop doorway and yelled, "Durr! Durr! Durr! Durr!" A fifty-year-old busker stood on a pavement torturing 'Up The Junction', by Squeeze. I decided to have some lunch, so on hands and knees I crawled into a Tudor doll's house with four foot high ceilings and sat at a tiny table under the plate glass window so I could have a ring-side view of the passing humanity outside. As I waited for my meal an old coot shuffled in and up to the counter.     "Oi'd loik a lubbly cuppa tea, madam", he said, all the while alternating rapidly from one foot to the other as if he desper...

A stunningly beautiful, slender, young Afro-Caribbean man sits on his chair in the cafe, long legs kicked out before him, both elbows on the table, head low, as he speaks into his mobile phone:    "But dey was really fightin' bruv, d'ya get me? Really punchin' an' kickin' an 'at ... I said to Roy, Look at dem go, dey is really fightin', proper into it, innit ...  Roy said dey is always gettin punchy ever since Brenda".

Overheard on the District Line this morning: "Well, yes, she does resemble a rabbit, I must admit. Nibble, nibble, nibble. "

Rolling along into the English countryside with Gang of Four on my headphones ( the girls they love to see you shoot / the girls they love to see you shoot ) and now the hawthorn thickets with their white flowers and waves of good will for all humanity washing over me and a big cup of coffee sitting in front of me which has just been delivered by a nice young bloke with a tattoo of a red rose on his  forearm and all the little dolls' houses sliding by as we pass and the beautiful English rain now falling from the slate-grey sky and speckling the plate glass window and forming little rivulets that cut through the view of the mud flats we have just crossed on an old iron bridge and I laugh and feel like dancing in the aisle.

On the train to Faversham the inspector wandered through, checking everyone's ticket. The woman in front of me was travelling with her mother and apparently they had boarded without a ticket. Then they discovered that they didn't quite have the right amount of money to buy one. They dipped into their bags, pulling out the odd notes and one-pound coins here, some loose change there, gradually amassing the money on the little table in front of them. And through all of this the inspector smiled politely and waited patiently. I watched this with amazement. If it was Melbourne, they would most likely have been thrown to the ground, pummeled and tossed off the train.

Found myself in Hammersmith early this morning, in the light silvery drizzle, with some hours to kill before an appointment. Decided to have the full English in a little cafe off the main strip. And how perfect that as I walked in the door the opening bars of Bowie's 'Life On Mars?' greeted me from the radio behind the counter. How lovely, I thought, that David will be joining me for breakfast today.

As I sit here in the hotel at 6.30am, I hear the alarm going off next door, where it is trying with all its might to wake the Middle Eastern family so they make their flight at Heathrow, presumably. It has been ringing away now for a good twenty minutes, and no one is stirring in there. I briefly thought about knocking on their door to help them along. But then I recalled how they kept me awake for several hours last night with their yelling and screaming and I decided not to fucking bother.

A team of young workmen digging up the pavement at Piccadilly Circus. One lad expertly handles the biggest wooden mallet I have ever seen. So deft was his great, swinging wrist action that I briefly toyed with the idea of offering to buy him a drink later on.

This morning I returned for a third time to look at the remarkable Titians in the National Gallery. After an hour of gazing at this brilliance I went to the cafe for a cup of tea. It was crowded and I found the only available table and sat down. Unfortunately, a couple of smug Academics was seated next to me - one from the US and the other from London. Both women were simply brimming with pompous  self-regard and their braying, puffed up voices were raised above the general murmur of gallery visitors and were clearly meant to inform the room of their 'importance'. They bleated interminably on and on about this syllabus and that sabbatical, and who had been transferred to which university, and who had been funded by which body, until I fairly wanted to turn their table over. Thank christ I am out of the self-perpetuating horror of that sterile, ego-driven milieu, in which so many of these sorts of one-dimensional, cardboard people limp off to stagnate, without a moment's tho...

On arrival at Heathrow, I sat patiently in my seat and waited while the rest of the passengers frantically jumped up and scrambled to grab their bags from the overhead lockers, so that they could be first to then stand in the aisles for fifteen minutes waiting for the exit doors to open. A large number of passengers had brought with them multi-coloured, horseshoe-shaped neck pillows, which seem to be all the rage on planes nowadays. They hung, all cheerful and wobbly, from the underneath of their backpacks, and so, as they all trooped towards the exit, they reminded me of baboons in heat, flashing their bright, lurid arses at one another.

Decided on an early night, so I walked down Praed Street, Paddington and found a place that served me a battered cod and chips with lots of tomato sauce and brown vinegar. Then I crossed the road and went into a little pub and downed a pint of cider. Now, as I lie in the hotel, listening to some gentle hindi drifting up through my window, life seems pretty good, actually.

In the Northern hemisphere night, as I drifted in and out of troubled sleep, 36,000 feet in the air, I was suddenly jolted awake by a stupfying flash in my eyes. The elderly man in the seat in front of me was now leaning over the back of his chair and directing a torch light into my face. "Hello, hello, could you possibly help me locate my tooth?", he asked, with a shee pish look on his face. I must have looked as completely non-plussed as I actually was, so he went on to explain that he had just taken a pen out of his shirt pocket and the tooth, which had also been nestling in there for some unknown fucking reason had flown out and landed somewhere in the dark. "It's a single tooth, connected to a steel wire contraption", he ventured, "It might be under your seat. I think I heard the tinkle as it landed." By now believing myself to be in the middle of a nightmarish Pinter play, I simply closed my eyes and feigned sleep in the face of this madness. Luc...

Walking along the balmy London street today, jostled amidst the throng of humanity pressing all around me, everything felt just right, somehow. Uncharacteristically, I felt waves of connection and love for each and every human face - and even the backs of people's heads - that I looked on. How odd to think that something so simple as changing my life situation can provoke a reaction that I have rarely experienced without the consumption of certain chemicals. I almost felt like Saint Francis. I hope all this is just an indication of happiness, rather than an incipient mental illness. 

A group of middle-aged Dutch women walk in front of me in the tube station. And, being Dutch, they are all big-boned and fifteen-foot tall and have ready-access to their humour-centres. They begin to run together down the corridor towards the platform, with their arms up in the air, leaning their bodies into the wind that rushes against us. Their gleeful laughter is unforced and infectious and it fills me with joy to see such natural happiness.

Having not 'taken my ease' before I left the hotel this morning, I waited until I got to the National Gallery to perform this vital task. Once there, I found the internationally-recognised pictogram for 'man' and 'woman' and stepped into the little corridor where the gender-assigned rooms lay waiting. As I turned the corner I saw the wide-doored room especially assigned to those with special needs . In my long experience, these particular toilets are invariably free of the incapacitated and so, on a whim, I quickly opened this door and walked in, securely turning the lock behind me, which was positioned, comically, two-feet from the floor. As I sat on the low-down toilet and delivered my morning compost, I luxuriated in the especially wide space of this room for the Special. You could park a Mini Cooper in there; it was almost as big as my living room back in Melbourne, although it was much better fitted out with chrome bars, handles and pulleys. On finishing my...

Across the road I watch a man in his late-thirties walking along, holding the hand of his daughter. She is around two-years-old and she has a look of grave concentration on her face as she negotiates the recently-acquired knowledge of placing one foot in front of the other to move herself forward. They walk with painstaking slowness. Neither of them speaks. It is Sunday and the road is almost devo id of traffic. They finally make it, step by slow, tottering step, all the way across the street, and draw near to where I sit enjoying a thick, strong, turkish coffee outside the Rose Cafe. As they pass by, I look from the daughter's plump, cherubic face up to her father's long, lugubrious face. Half-stooped, in order to reach his daughter's small hand, he is also concentrating on the task of walking. He seems to be gritting his teeth; his eyes are half-closed. I look at his close-cropped hair, which reveals a long, wide, pink scar that travels up from behind his right ear over t...

A young simpleton on the escalator of Charing Cross underground looks around in alarm and yells, "I'm a lickle bit scared! I'm a lickle bit scared! I always get a lickle bit scared on these fings!" To which, out of nowhere, a woman yells, "Fuckin' get used to it, we 'ave!"

A team of young workmen digging up the pavement at Piccadilly Circus. One lad expertly handles the biggest wooden mallet I have ever seen. So deft was his great, swinging wrist action that I briefly toyed with the idea of offering to buy him a drink later on.

In the morning I decided that I needed a haircut. I found a Middle Eastern barber shop amongst several others in the street. Five rather surly, attractive, young Middle Eastern men lounged on chairs outside, so I decided this was the one I would use. I was ushered inside by 'Abdul', a twenty-something man with big brown eyes one could drown in. He set about clipping my silvery shag into shape and  tweaking my forelock. Nice day?" he said. I agreed with a smile, meeting his camel-eyes in the mirror as his lightly calloused fingers delicately gripped my blushing pink ear and bent it forward to reach the unruly fronds beneath. He then busied himself cutting and snipping until the job was all nicely finished, whereupon he again met my eyes in the mirror and asked, "You want gel  now, mate?" It took me a split-second to snap out of my reverie and realise that this was not quite the offer I had initially misunderstood.