A Kennington 'Scholar'

   This morning I crossed the road to the three Polish sisters' cafe for breakfast coffee and an egg and bacon sandwich. I took a seat up the back of the little establishment, which was empty but for an old coot sitting in the opposite corner. His great beak of a nose was dipping over the pages of The Times and his lips moved silently with the effort of reading. After a while he pulled out a pair of spectacles and held one lens up to his right eye and continued reading, methodically, every column. At last he had wrung out all of the information from the paper and he folded it in half, and in half again. Then he pulled out of his coat pocket a well-thumbed bible, grimy with use. He opened it at a random page. Next, he took an enormous magnifying glass from another pocket and began to read the tiny, inflammatory text. Many sections had been highlighted in fluorescent yellow or pink and there were little slips of bookmarking paper jutting out all through the object so that it rather resembled a dirty black and white Pangolin. He looked up from his Bronze Age fiction and caught my eye.
    "Might you have the time, sir?" he asked. I looked at my watch.
    "A quarter past nine." He grunted in approval and bent his beak back to his task. My breakfast arrived and I lost track of his studies over in the corner. Suddenly he stood up and advanced towards my table.
    "Do you want something to read, sir?" For an awful moment I thought he was going to offer me his little curled paper armadillo, but then I saw he was brandishing the Times instead. So I accepted it with relief and wished him a pleasant day.

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