The Problem With Janice, Apparently

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 best. She does a little pirouette at each table and informs each total stranger,
   “My toof fell out yesterday, look!” And each time she makes the announcement she plugs both her index fingers into her mouth and stretches it wide, the better to reveal her gap. My turn comes. I coldly stare her down and she scampers off.
One of the waitresses walks to the front of the room, where there is a glass-fronted ice cream refrigerator. She’s carrying a cloth and a bottle of window cleaner, which she now proceeds to spray over the glass. I watch, incredulous, as the chemical mist drifts down over the unprotected tubs of gelati. At the table to my left two middle-aged women are tucking into their Sunday roast lamb. One lifts her fork in order to make her point and, with her mouth full, says,
   “See, the problem wiv Janice is that she’s really fuckin’ unsophisticated. And, quite honestly, Karen, now that I think about it, she’s thick as shit.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Bethnal Green Send Off

     A family shambles into the pub, all dressed in black. It comprises a set of obese twins, one of whom is the mother of a boy and a girl aged about eight and nine.       "My god", she says to the barman, "I need a fuckin' drink after the day I've 'ad." She orders for the entire entourage and they all sit around three tables, which they hastily drag together. The woman now spots me in the corner and she galumphs over on unsteady, knock-kneed legs, with a plaintive look across her pale, doughy face.     "'Scuse me luv, can I take summer dese chairs?" She gestures to the three empty seats around my table. I tell her she can. "Only, I cremated me muvver dis mornin'. " she says, apropos of nothing. I give her my condolences.       She seats her two children on tall stools at the bar. Another family member arrives with two bags of McDonald's food. He places these in front of the kids, who eagerly dig in. The adults sit ad...
Read more

Clomping Through the NPG

   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?" ...
Read more

The Old Marquis

     I found myself at the French House in Dean Street, Soho, where I sat at the bar and had a number of glasses of the house lager. I eavesdropped on the conversations.      A young man in his late twenties asked his friend, a woman about thirty, how she was.      "Oh, alright, I suppose," she replied, "except for having to shove suppositories up my father's arse for the last ten days."       Two old gents were seated on the stools under the window. They were red-faced, very merry, and very loud.             "And, of course, when I was sixteen," one said, "I was taken under the wing of the old Marquis, and I went out to live on his estate. He taught me a great deal about society, and food, and wine, and what to wear to table, and that sort of thing. All kinds of things, really. It was the perfect education for a young chap, in all sorts of ways ... And, of course...
Read more