Street Sadness

    In the evening I ventured into my local Hackney Hipster pub. It serves a small selection of imported beers and de rigeur Hipster pizza, baked in the de rigeur moulded pizza oven, which resembles a Mongolian yurt, with a de rigeur shiny, polished steel chimney rising out of the top of it, like a sparkling telescope on a tiny hilltop. The furniture was recycled, all de rigeur mis-matched wooden chairs and second-hand leather club couches. The staff are uniformly Hipster: to this end the boys all have number-one-cropped back and sides, with a lank mop of long hair scraped back over the top of the very cool cranium; this is offset by straggly, pubic, Ned Kelly beards. The girls all have ponytails and wear cotton print dresses teamed with big, clunky, ironic boots. In the Hipster manner, all staff are required to exhibit an inordinate amount of self-interest at all times, even during the taking of orders from the customers. Hence, it was not uncommon for one of the bar...

Two dreadful young women on the Hammersmith and Central Line tube driving everyone insane with their inane prattle. Well, one prattled while the other nodded sheepishly along. They boarded the train and sat on either side of a middle-aged Afro-Caribbean man. They leant forward so that they could speak to each other, across him, which they commenced to do, very loudly, obviously for the benefit of us mere plebs in the carriage. The bigger of the two bleated,   "So, ya, I just realised that I had literally no energy for, like, three  weeks. Felt really lethargic."   "Oh, wow."   "Ya, it was pretty bad  actually. Went to work, but couldn't get any  enthusiasm up about it. So work probably suffered."   "Oh, wow."   "So I started going to yoga on Tuesday nights, which is, like, a ma zing You just feel so  much energy, like, coursing  through you afterwards. And then I started doing Pilates with Jinny and Raquel, which is mar vellous, act...

Walked into the Sun Inn for my customary afternoon pint of Spitfire. Today there was a dwarf standing at the bar. He wore a blue singlet, so his very tattooed arms were revealed in all their glory. He was drinking a half-pint, which seemed appropriate. Having finished my couple of drinks, I stepped out into the street. I heard a 'putt-putt-putt-putt' which seemed to be getting closer. Overlaid on this noise was the joyous whoop of youthful cries.    "Go! Fuckin' go, Pete!"    "Let 'er rip, Pete!"    "Fuuuuuuuuckin' goooooooo!" Soon, the cause of the ruckus appeared over the neo-cobbled street: three teenage boys on an electric wheelchair. One was seated on the vinyl seat, steering the little craft; another smaller boy was sitting side-saddle on his lap with his long thin legs hanging out the side; the third was shirtless, he was standing somehow behind the driver, clinging with one hand to the boy's shoulder and waving his tee...

I sat in the tiny cafe being bombarded with questions from the young waitress: "not too hot for you inside? Are you comfortable at this table? Are you eating today? Do you want a little jug of milk with your coffee? Would you like hot or cold milk?" I answered politely to each question. The manageress, a stern-faced, bustling woman in her late fifties said to me,   "So many questions isn't there! Must make some of the customers annoyed... We get that Bob Geldof comin' in 'ere quite a lot and the uvver day our young waitriss was askin' 'im wot 'e wanted and he juss snapped at 'er, 'For Christ's sake will you just go away!' She came back 'ere croiyin' 'er eyes out, poor lamb. Ooh, it was awful". My young waitress was now serving a man, old enough to be her father, who had just ordered lunch at the counter, "Orright , my dullin', where you sittin' then? Oil bring it right out for yoh". Just then, ...

Oskar Kokoschka At four-thirty, in the hot and sultry afternoon, I wandered into the nearly deserted village square. A young man walked ahead of me with his girlfriend on his arm. In the middle-distance another young couple lurched towards us.  They were in their late-twenties. He was a shirtless, tightly-sprung, wiry, monkey-faced lad with close-cropped hair over his knobbly skull; she was a big-boned girl with lank, straw-coloured hair and a dark swelling below her left eye; brown rabbit-teeth crowded out of her mouth.  She bore a striking resemblance to end-of-career-Oskar Kokoschka. Both were affected by alcohol or drugs or both and were having difficulty walking. Monkey-face was wobbling ahead, dragging Oskar by the flabby arm; both were reeling, and yelling.    "I don' wanna go down 'ere!"    "Well, you fuckin' are!" As they drew close to the young man walking ahead of me, Monkey-face gathered his addled thoughts and swerved his hard littl...

An old geezer in the pub talks about feeding hedgehogs in his garden, "They love cat food, 'edge'ogs do. They fuckin' love it, greedy little piggies. But they only eat the meat-based catfood, not the fish-based. 'Edge'ogs don't eat fish, you see." He paused in his narrative and then called to the barman, "Nobsy, can I 'ave a piece of that jumbo toilet roll? I'm sweatin' loik a fuckin' pig after them chips".

In the morning I found a small barber shop and, due to the handsome young man inside wielding the scissors, I decided on the spur of the moment to get a haircut. I sat on the red leather couch and waited for my turn in the chair.  There were two people on duty today; my young man and a young woman, who was now chopping away at the straggly mane of a man in his early-60s whose name, it transpired, was Johnny. It seemed that he was a publican at a pub called The Ship. It was quite hot in the shop so she decided to turn on the upright fan, which she now directed at Johnny. It didn’t seem to be working very effectively because Johnny suddenly said,     “Twist the knob, girl, twist the knob. Give it a good ol’ twist”.    “Wo’choo say?” she replied, with mock seriousness, “Twist yer knob? You dirty ol’ devil!” They both laughed. The young barber paused in his work on the head of a sullen man in his mid-fifties and said,    “You wanna watch ‘i...

Having left the house today without a pad and pen, and thinking that I’d probably want to record some overheard conversations throughout the day, I went into a newsagents. I found the particular pen that I favour for this task, and an autograph book, which was on special and cheap. When I put the items on the counter, the woman said, “Ooh, lovely! Are you off to get some autographs today, then? Ronnie Corbett was in the village last week, oh, he is funny”. She seemed disappointed when I said I was only going to take notes in it.    “We do have plain notebooks, dear, if that’s what you want … But they don’t have the different coloured pages, I suppose. Is that what you were after, then, coloured pages, was it?” I said Yes, which seemed to mystify her.  Then I went directly to the Tudor-era pub down the road. Possibly due to the very sultry weather there was a very strong miasma of old urine which seemed to rise up from the ancient wooden floorboards. This was not u...

Overheard an old biddy in the pub, talking about her ancient mother: “I said: Mum, you have to stop eating the potpourri, it’s all flowery and musky, all ‘orrible, it won’t do you any good at all … But at least she won’t be all coma-ry again. She’s finished with all that comatose stuff.”

It was the day of the annual Faversham Nautical Festival. Small groups of people from the amateur dramatics society meander through the crowd, dressed as characters from Dickens novels. Three young men charge, yelling, through the crowd, dressed as Victorian robbers, or ne'er-do-wells, or something, but their point was rather lost on me. A man in a grotesque seal costume rolled about on the cobbles, making little children cry with his coughing bark. Down at the river a flotilla of craft bobbed in the sun, each strung with bunting and with their most colourful sails hoist. A teenage pirate with a cardboard sword and eyepatch welcomed children onboard a 'pirate' ship: they boarded the vessel by way of a rickety gangplank. Later, outside a little whitewashed riverside pub an elderly man steps back to illustrate a point in his conversation with two others. His feet strike a stone milestone and he falls backwards to the ground in slow motion, landing with a thud on his back...

    At 5.30 every evening the village of Faversham is suddenly completely devoid of humans. The bustling daytime streets of shoppers, moochers and shuffling oldsters are now eerily quiet. The gaily-painted dollhouse shops are all shuttered for the approaching night, creaking on their ancient foundations in the gentle evening breeze. I wondered how many Roman coins lie buried in the mud and chalk under the machine-cut neo-cobbles, how many Tudor, how many Stuart.     As I head up the gentle slope of the d eserted street dozens of enormous speckled gulls wheel in. Their advance is heralded by the loneliest of squawking cries as they call instructions to each other offstage: it is a frigid, Arctic cry, redolent of ice and granite and loss and despair. Now they appear, gliding high over the rooftops from where they survey the prospects of Prospect Street. Here they come, spiraling down onto the empty street on their terrible 747 wings, their great flapping f...

Last week in London, I decided to try an Indian restaurant for dinner in Bateman Street. As I pushed the front door open a small Indian man in his early-sixties eyed me suspiciously and then strode towards me wearing a stony expression and an unconvincing toupee. He silently ushered me to a table and, as I sat down, my smile was insufficient to crack his icy shell. He handed me a menu.     “Drink?” he asked. I ordered a small bottle of beer and when he brought it over he half-filled the glass so that the other half was froth, up to the brim. I smiled and thanked him and then perused the menu while he stood to attention at the side of the table. I hastily ordered the rogan josh and steamed rice. He went off to place the order.     When he returned I asked him where the toilet was. Wordlessly, he pointed at the ceiling, then at a tucked away door which couldn’t be seen from the tables. At the top of the stairs there were two doors. One was marked with a mal...