Street Sadness

    On the Mile End bus a young, black, schizophrenic man began a long, loud conversation with himself,    "Yeah, man! All the fun of the fair, innit? Out on the island - but not Long Island. That'd be too tragic, man. Too tragic. Too tragic, blud. Down on her luck that's for sure. For damned  sure, I'm tellin' ya. I won't even. I won't even. There isn't even one down there who can tell it like it is. When they come out of their shell, like, there ain't anuvver fing to say about it. For real, blud, for real. I'm tellin' ya." I got off at the junction and found a place that served Sunday roast lunch. At the next table sat three young women, two men and a child a little under a year old. One of the women said,      "When you go to Venice it's so damned confusing because you can never find a bridge to get over to the other damned side of the canal. I mean, we could see the damned hotel over there on the other side, but do you...

    I was to meet friends, Chrissie and her son, Ivan, at a small theatre near Leicester Square. I arrived very early and so I wandered about the tourist-choked streets to find somewhere to eat that wasn't also stuffed with foreign visitors, with their ubiquitous wheely-cases.       I settled on a small Chinese restaurant. The delightful young waiter pointed to a table near the back, which faced the window and all the other diners. I was the only non-Chinese customer in the place, which I took to be a very good sign that the food would be authentic and good and not expensive. Everybody was under twenty-five, which meant that they all looked about eleven. The boys all wore basketball caps, turned backwards, as if they'd stepped out of a John Hughes movie; their girlfriends were all tiny and delicate, like flowers; one or two of them wore big, plastic-framed spectacles - or, to be more accurate, they wore the frames, as there were clearly no lenses in the...