Casting a Spell in Pimlico

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.

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