Gloomy Saturday
I caught a bus to an area with which I was unfamiliar. I wandered around the streets looking for photo opportunities. It was a world of cracked concrete, and broken glass, and mucous-larded pavements, and no prospects. The lead-grey sky draped itself heavily over the tracts of council houses and flats. No birds were to be seen in the barren trees: they'd clearly long ago given the area up as a bad joke.
I walked across a small concrete square which was glossy from a recently passing shower. It was ringed with tiny, beaten up shops, which were all locked for the weekend, some with metal screens and chains. A dozen or so local women, wearing hijabs, walked across the square, individually or in pairs, their dark eyes sweeping before them, as inscrutable and unknowable as their husbands could wish them to be. I looked past them down one of the roads and saw four mid-teenage boys; one of them had a smaller boy in a headlock and the rest were spitting at him.
My nose now acknowledged the unmistakable, pungent odour of Skunk. It had drifted down from perhaps dozens of flats nearby, and the miasma was now corralled inside the square, unable to drift away to join the other happy little ganja clouds across east London.
Periodically, at my feet, fat winter worms spasmed epileptically, without hope, on the concrete. Presumably, they had optimistically eased out of the black earth that ringed the square during the drizzle and had now become stranded unexpectedly in no-wormsland. Tomorrow would find them glued to the same spot, crisp and dark brown, encased in a scintilla of ice.
A muscular Jamaican man in his forties now strode toward me. He stopped in my path and held out a pink palm. His eyes were those of a person just woken from a deep sleep. A jagged silver scar tracked sinuously across his forehead.
"Yeah, man!" he said with a maniacal cackle, "Do the right ting, man, whatever dat ting may be! Bless you, mister, bless you!" With that, he waved me on my way.
An elderly orange cat ran across the road on unsteady legs to the opposite pavement, narrowly avoiding the wheels of a battered green van which creaked by on ancient axles. A woman screamed from a window above my head: it was hard to tell whether in mirth or terror. I headed up to the main road in the hope of catching a bus to somewhere else.
I walked across a small concrete square which was glossy from a recently passing shower. It was ringed with tiny, beaten up shops, which were all locked for the weekend, some with metal screens and chains. A dozen or so local women, wearing hijabs, walked across the square, individually or in pairs, their dark eyes sweeping before them, as inscrutable and unknowable as their husbands could wish them to be. I looked past them down one of the roads and saw four mid-teenage boys; one of them had a smaller boy in a headlock and the rest were spitting at him.
My nose now acknowledged the unmistakable, pungent odour of Skunk. It had drifted down from perhaps dozens of flats nearby, and the miasma was now corralled inside the square, unable to drift away to join the other happy little ganja clouds across east London.
Periodically, at my feet, fat winter worms spasmed epileptically, without hope, on the concrete. Presumably, they had optimistically eased out of the black earth that ringed the square during the drizzle and had now become stranded unexpectedly in no-wormsland. Tomorrow would find them glued to the same spot, crisp and dark brown, encased in a scintilla of ice.
A muscular Jamaican man in his forties now strode toward me. He stopped in my path and held out a pink palm. His eyes were those of a person just woken from a deep sleep. A jagged silver scar tracked sinuously across his forehead.
"Yeah, man!" he said with a maniacal cackle, "Do the right ting, man, whatever dat ting may be! Bless you, mister, bless you!" With that, he waved me on my way.
An elderly orange cat ran across the road on unsteady legs to the opposite pavement, narrowly avoiding the wheels of a battered green van which creaked by on ancient axles. A woman screamed from a window above my head: it was hard to tell whether in mirth or terror. I headed up to the main road in the hope of catching a bus to somewhere else.
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