THERE IS STILL NO HANDWASH IN THE GENTS.
What is going on here?
Is the dispenser broken?
I feel the café should acknowledge this, at least in the form of a note by the handwash dispenser.
Meanwhile, a metre or so to the left (it is cramped behind the swing saloon doors) someone has laid a couple of sheets of tissue over the women’s taps.
Curious, I thought to myself.
Mind you, I always use tissues to handle taps in public loos.
I risked THE café this morning for the first morning since January (I’ve been sticking to afternoons), figuring that the regulars that frequently engage me in chat during the morning hours, and which, to be fair, I’ve enjoyed chatting to, are likely to be away for Easter. It looks like my hunch turned out to be true. I just felt I needed to break the familiarity with a couple of them because it was affecting my work and for no other reason. Until the day comes when I find I can write from home again, THE café and its junior partner, the back-up café, are the only places in which I can write. The flat is just the place I try to sleep in and somehow survive in. It’s a base, not a home.
There’s a guy in here, a long time regular going back a dozen years perhaps, who is the younger brother of a regular who is still a regular and was already here when I first showed up on Sunday 15th August 2001. Both brothers are bald but the older brother resisted shaving his fast-disappearing locks for close to fifteen years, regularly bleaching it like some mid-90s footballer, to try and disguise the rapidly diminishing hairline. I’m guessing the younger brother saw his older sibling’s doomed struggle and refusal to accept the inevitable and thought, “No, I’m not going through that. I will own my baldness.” And he has.
Younger Bald Brother has for years had a spectacular big dark beard, well groomed, not one of those messy beards, to compensate for the baldness. I would definitely have shaved my head had I been in the same situation. The shaved head is a great look, it feels good too and it’s fun to shave your head, though not every white guy is suited to it.
In other news, here is an old picture that was messaged to me last night that took me aback, simply because that is the closest I got to my original nose. It’s the family nose on my dad’s side, which I had inherited, albeit at that stage of my life, two noses on.
Within months of losing my mum, I entered a strange period of incurring injuries, primarily nose-related. In the summer of 2000, my uncle accompanied me to the first of these surgeries at St Thomas’s. I’d lost my mum four months earlier and to be honest, anything, even breaking a bone, was a welcome distraction. I’d broken it playing football. Incidentally, 2000 and 2009, when I lost both my mum and Lopez, were the best years I’ve had playing football. I think my performances were so good because the football was an outlet for the grieving. Outside of those two years, I rarely reached that form consistently.
In 2000, I have to acknowledge milking the injury when it happened in the park because ever since I’d seen Bryan Robson’s shoulder pop out in Mexico ’86, I wanted a spectacular injury and the attention that came with it. While I have a limited range of facial expressions, I can do anguished with my eyes closed and I certainly did it that June evening and I suspect I was still doing it in the hospital that night when I was taken to hospital by two mates. I had to spend the next week with a bent nose before surgery.
Things with my dad and I were fraught at that time, as they often were because he was more difficult than I am, but the rawness of losing my mum and the cruelty of being the one that had found her body did all manner of things to my head for a couple of years, so the relationship with my dad was particularly bad at that time.
Grieving is impossible. You can’t come back from it. What you do is you reshape your life and move forward, carrying the loss with you and learning in time not to let it define you. But when you are the person that finds someone, as I did with my mum, or you have someone die in your arms, as Lopez died in mine nine years later, those things unfortunately do define you.
When my dad found out I’d broken my nose and had it straightened, three things happened. Being obsessed with all things surgical, he asked me something like a hundred questions about the incident and the surgery. Two, he liked the fact I’d broken my nose playing football. It ticked all the right masculine boxes for him. And three, he wasn’t happy I hadn’t asked him to come along with me. How could I though if we hadn’t been talking? He was hurt. Remember too, he lived just below me since relocating to the bedsit downstairs in ’91, way too long after he had divorced my mum. But such was the entrenchment of the estrangement that summer that he hadn’t even heard I’d broken my nose. Looking back, this was the only period I ever felt sorry for my dad who had so many failings as a husband and dad. However, in the two and a half years he remained around after we lost our mum, he came good for me. There were times though in those early months where he didn’t know how to reach out to me to begin repairing a relationship that had broken very quickly, by the morning of the funeral in fact, and I didn’t make it easy for him.
That first nose break was in fact the third nose operation I’d had, but my first since I was a kid. However, it was the most dramatic injury I’ve ever had, apart from the time I left a Brixton party in the summer of 2001, River Phoenix style, and collapsed (backwards) in the forecourt cracking my head.
Back to the nose though.
I then needed to have the nose reset a year later and got a call one Friday evening from the hospital telling me they’d call me in for surgery the following week. Four years later, the call finally came. Poor quality NHS admin is nothing new. This is partly why during Lockdown I was never out there with pots and pans in support of the NHS. Admittedly that was also influenced by a lack of pots and pans. I’m not a big one for spending time in the kitchen.
Some weeks after that surgery, during which the surgeon, without running it past me, had widened my nostrils to a head-turning degree that horrified the introvert in me, the girl I was with at the time accidentally elbowed my nose and broke it. There’ve been a few girls who probably would’ve wanted to elbow me in the face intentionally but this was an accident.
I’d also been warned by the hospital to stay away from THE café and pubs that summer for eight weeks. Remember, this was pre-smoking ban. I was so bored and missing THE café badly that I was coming here after about a month and the way these Portuguese smoke soon wrecked the nose. A combination of the nose being broken again and infected as a result of the smoke inhalation meant I had a fifth and final nose job in the late summer of 2007.
Tonight, I have what is likely to be my only gig of the week in Colindale. I think it’s been the right decision for me to keep my load light after a few gigs were cancelled. I’m not enjoying the circuit much at the moment. I did a light rehearsal this morning and will do another one before I leave for tonight’s long trek which will involve a rare underground journey for me. Then it’s all about remembering not to eat meat tomorrow.
As much as the back-up café helps me, being in there is like being in a dead marriage. Being in here, in THE café, is like being in an affair that has never lost its allure or intensity.
Café Soundscape 12:12hrs
The rain, supposedly light, continues to come down in south London. I thought, from what I’d seen in the weather forecast for the week, we were on for a run of better weather. Checking again, from tomorrow it looks like we’re set for just three days of slightly brighter temperatures before the wet weather returns next week. I recall April 2011 being similarly crap weather-wise. I remember as when I brought the spring jacket back out that year (a hoodie, I believe that year), when it finally got warm. I recall tying this around my shoulders in a poncy, sash-like fashion. It’s a look that I ended up reviving in the summer of 2021, a decade after first abandoning the look.
The Head Man of SW8, with his customary hat to disguise what I think he suspects is too large a head, is in with his partner. I love watching these two row over who pays. It usually falls on The Head Man, who has always been the more stable of the two guys. At least once a week Head will make a point of getting Laidback to pay, feeling it’s only right for the relationship, but it never quite happens and the couple end up arguing once again. Their relationship is the gay equivalent of my aunt and uncle’s. Always rowing, leaving you wondering how on earth they’ve remained together.
Before I leave you today, I’ve noted I’ve been lifting my tall glass sinister-handed here, which is normal for me in SW8, but it hasn’t escaped my attention that my hold has been unusually high up on the glass. It’s unusually inelegant for me.
Addressing this, I slipped my (left-sided) fingers through the handle, again, something I rarely do. I suspect this is down to my tall glass-handling muscle memory diminishing as I scale back my post-March ’23 appearances in THE café. My hands, from handling the shorter tall glasses in the back-up café, are maybe becoming confused.
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