Street Sadness

    I trekked over to the Marks & Spencer shop in Kensington High Street to buy a pair of trousers my only other pair now worn through at the crotch. I found a pair of black jeans to my liking for £24. Then I caught the tube to Notting Hill Gate, which I had not visited since my art residency as a fresh-faced, naive, recently-ex-student, here in 1983 : after a stint living in the painter John Walker's studio in Kew Gardens we had moved to a bedsit which was almost next door to the Royal Oak tube station. I remember often walking the short distance to Notting Hill, where we sometimes browsed the Portobello Road Market. I wanted to see if things had changed in the thirty-two intervening years. They had. I was a naive, fresh-faced fool to have thought otherwise.     I walked up from the tube entrance and found my bearings immediately. I turned right and headed up the road in the direction of Portobello Road. I turned off the main road and immediately knew where I w...

     I walked down the length of Roman Road until I arrived at Bethnal Green tube station. The final few blocks of the road are grim and there is much evidence of bad municipal decisions on 'brightening up' the soulless tower blocks and estates that crowd up towards Cambridge Hill Road, as if trying to flee to better regions. In a concrete common area, surrounded by one such estate, a brittle-looking metal statue of an adolescent, of indeterminate sex, and its dog, straddled a trickling fountain; it made me think of a bidet.       I turned right into Cambridge Hill Road and headed towards the V&A's Museum of Childhood. It is housed in a grim Victorian warehouse. I heard screams as I neared the big 1960's glass entrance doors. As I pushed these open the screams became deafening. In the foyer a sullen young girl in a black uniform sat on a stool at the next doorway. I smiled at her as I entered and received no response whatever. The screams we...

On Saturday afternoon I stopped into the pub for a pint. As I stood waiting at the bar, a middle-aged black man was engaged in conversation with the young barman. "Iss my berfday today. It is. Iss my berfday and I'm fifty-one today. I know I don't look it, do I?" I looked at his sunken cheeks and his 'lived-in' face and thought that he looked every minute of his fifty-one years.     "You are doing very well for fifty-one", I lied.      "Yeah, bruv!" he said, "Black don't crack!" He laughed at this observation and cast his gaze around the room for others who might be laughing along to the truism. Then he asked what football team I followed. I told him that I didn't. He said that he had a big Chelsea tattoo on his thigh. And then he launched into an obliquely-related story.     "You see, the fing is, right? I rang up this lady from the escorts, 'cos I really like big bosoms, right? An' she's out HERE!...

   This afternoon I found myself in Baker Street and outside a cinema where 'Legend' was playing. I saw that the next session started in fifteen minutes, so I went downstairs (it was a basement cinema) and bought a ticket. The good looking young man behind the counter said that they had only sold four tickets. I expressed surprise and he said that people rarely came in to an afternoon session, but that the evenings are always packed. We then got talking about the brilliance of T om Hardy, who we agreed was a very special actor.     I checked my ticket and found my seat number in the dark. It was immediately behind a young Afro-Caribbean couple. They talked all the way through the advertisements, which for me is a cardinal sin for which I would hang, draw and quarter all perpetrators - when the lights go down, shut the hell up, even if it IS only the ads.     All through the promo for Michael Fassbender in 'Hamlet' the young man kept flicki...

    The other day I walked down Dean Street to The French for an afternoon drink. It was rather drizzly and I had worked up a thirst traipsing around trying to find a bank so that I could do some boring bits of business.     Outside The French was a crowd of boorish young men yahooing and showing off for each other, several were smoking those recently-fashionable glass things that resemble thick, ugly thermometers. I ventured inside, where it was quite gloomy and just my style. A few people clustered around the bar engaging in friendly banter. Two men from behind-the-scenes in television sat at the corner of the bar talking about various projects they were working on at the moment. I ordered a glass of beer from the sullen blonde girl with pigtails, in her early-twenties. She poured it out with bad grace and slammed it on the counter in front of me, slopping a few mouthfuls onto the bar. I withdrew my proffered £5 and asked her to top up the glass. S...