One of the weaker, late-era Aha songs was playing in the café this morning as I unpacked my bag and parked myself at a window table. I don’t usually sit here, though these days, I’m glad I’m no longer preoccupied with getting to sit at a favourite table. Since the pandemic cost me Table Ten, the table in the corner by the swing saloon doors by the loos, I’ve moved around from table to table, much as I did with my accommodation during the dreadful years of 2000 to 2014.
These window tables are always a risk in the colder months. The ill-thought-out retractable doors installed in the curious refurbishment of 2004, and which I thought would be blown off in the gales earlier this year, aren’t suited to our still too-short summers. They’re too draughty and in the winter, as well as exposing yourself to the passive smoking as the café’s still formidable number of Portuguese smokers that gather outside to smoke in all weather, you will need a number of layers to survive the cold over on this side of the establishment. With only two heaters here, it’s not the warmest place in London.
In the latest hand wash update, there’s still no hand soap in the Gents. This never gets reported to staff. I've given up trying to understand it. Is there no hand wash because it's the men here who wash their hands or is the handwash always slow to be refilled because the café knows the male savages here don't care for the hand wash?
Is the women's hand wash always full because it's the women who use the hand wash so it’s always replenished, or is it full because the women don't wash their hands?
I've long been confused by this.
All I know is who are you if you don't wash your hands?
I don’t feel I can raise this massive hygiene fail with the staff without perhaps fracturing what has been a significantly improved relationship in the last decade. Plus, they know I’m well stocked for hand gel (not fragrance free these days). They’re probably of the opinion I could clean the hands of all their filthy-handed regulars with my supplies alone. While that might have been true for years, since losing one of my pandemic-era bus rail handling gloves, that’s no longer the case. I couldn’t continue wearing a single glove on the buses like some Return of the Jedi-era Luke Skywalker. Visually it was looking ridiculous. And also, I was concerned that my left arm (being left only with the left glove) would end up considerably bigger than the right arm from the effort of propelling myself from the upper to lower deck of buses one-handed. Until I can afford some new bus-specific gloves, I’m just making sure I hand gel in-between every bus I hop on. It’s costing me a small fortune in hand gel. I’ve never gone through the stuff as quick as this and of course these days, hand gel is no longer reasonably priced. Thinking about it, if I took the hit and got gloves now, I’d probably make a saving long-term.
Outside the café, a couple of young women, their lips cosmetically ‘enhanced’ to give them the trout pouts that five years ago seemed to be the preserve of the wealthy (much older women of Knightsbridge and the surrounding SW1 environs, sit in their tracksuits shooting the breeze, wrapping their paid for lips around one cigarette after another. One of them holds a little dog in an arm. I’ve seen her around South Lambeth Road with the dog always in her arms. Never mind the country’s obesity crisis. Some of these women who for some reason prefer to carry their small dogs rather than walk them, are going to be responsible for an entire generation of unusually lazy small dogs.
I made a point of RESTING yesterday after a spell of relentless gigging and running. Normally I run three nights a week, resting a day before the next run, but because I feel so jaded, I’ve been making sure I go for a run too just before that evening’s gig, even if I’ve just run the night before. It makes my head less foggy, and I feel the benefit on stage. While I find I can compete with younger comics in terms of the amount of gigs I’m doing, and am even doubling up on gigs now on the same night, the days when I don’t gig, and try to do nothing, my body lets me know in no uncertain terms where I am in my life now physically. The last two weekends have seen a complete physical collapse, and I’ve just ended up in bed. I’m all for resting but this has seemed more like being overwhelmed by lethargy rather than resting and I don’t welcome it. This Sunday just gone, I had another Gong show to get through, this one in Vauxhall, and to counter the drowsiness, I took myself off for a run in the park. It's not my favourite thing to do on a Sunday but I needed it.
I’m breaking from the running until tomorrow evening. Tonight, have what is likely to be the final outdoor game of football of the calendar year with my old team in Regent’s Park. I’ll be leaving extra early to get there because buses in central London are on diversion owing to the Queen’s passing, obviously.
I say ‘football’, but I find these days, particularly with the outdoor games that it just usually means running around, which is fine anyway, as it’s great to have any workout. The great thing about running now for three years is in my team of veterans, I am now the fittest member of the team by a long way. In our peak years, with the asthma, I was usually the one struggling. Last week was my first game in a good while owing to the gigging, and just the opening minute of the game, turning to receive a ball and running with it, I was shocked at how physically demanding that moment was. It was weird. Presumably because I hadn’t done it in a while, but I quickly settled down and was soon performing a spectacular one-man press on the opposition, feeling some concern as to how far away we probably were from a defibrillator should I pay the price for my frenzied closing down.
I’m revelling in being this fit. I was running late for last week’s game and ran all the way from Baker Street station to our pitch, a good 20 minutes away, with a heavy rucksack. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I love just running for a bus and making it with ease and in complete control of my breathing. It was actually a moment of chasing and getting on a bus back in the early summer of 2019 and finding myself wheezing on the bus that made me realise that with my fractured foot now finally healed, I needed to start doing proper exercise again. Swimming was always my preferred workout. I love it (only in a pool) but it’s such a pain having to get up really early to get a lane and the changing rooms and showers in my local sports centre, pre-pandemic, were always something of a dump, so running, given it wasn’t going to cost much, apart from, eventually, proper running shoes, was the obvious route. I wish I’d been so fit in younger years. It’s classic me, always late to the party.
But back to the football, briefly. These days it often means spending the evening trying to run after some kid that’s picked up all the fancy showboating skills of the modern-day footballer, all available to learn on YouTube these days, that my generation of largely limited amateurs didn’t have access to. Once the rain came down last week, without studs, I knew I’d struggle to maintain my feet on the surface. Towards the end of the game, I took several spectacular stumbles, including one where I came off the ground and landed flat on my back. I was feeling that the next day.
As we got changed after the game, someone broke the news the Queen had passed away earlier that evening, and I immediately cast my mind back to my mum having to pick me up from school after I was the only member of my class not wanting to attend the Silver Jubilee celebration in Clapham. In the end, my mum and aunt took myself, my sibling and our cousin, to Clapham Common where we waited on the kerb, with Union Jack flags as the Queen passed through in a London black cab. That memory has long been vague without growing any fuzzier these days.
I just paused the composition of this latest newsletter, and I apologise for the lack of posts in the last ten days, but it’s been full on and today I’ll be posting more than once on here, to speak to Future Me, the café’s octogenarian regular. FM was meant to be travelling to Westminster to see the Queen lying in state. He’s been around so long that he went to see Churchill’s coffin in ’65 but these days, I think he’s just a bit younger than my aunt though he looks considerably older, he doesn’t think he’ll have the stamina to go to Westminster. He tells me that the woman in the local pub who was organising for the bar’s regulars to travel to Westminster today has told him that it’s taking around 10 hours for people to actually file past the coffin. A personal view is that for 2022, this is a very curious pilgrimage. As a lifelong Republican with a deep aversion to forelock tugging and the honours system, I’m just keeping my head down during this period which feels uncomfortably 1997ish, albeit not as big. I get we are living through history but it’s also 2022. Andrew Rawnsley, writing in The Observer, while lauding the deceased monarch for her long service, which I acknowledge, still managed to capture how I feel about the Royals, saying that he was writing as ‘someone who finds a hereditary head of state intellectually indefensible’.
My big concern is we’re now into the fourth Tory Government of the last 12 years and this lot will rival the last shower for mediocrity and underhanded manoeuvres, and the energy crisis has been off the headlines for the last week now at a very critical stage. This isn’t good. I’m already feeling the cold in my current flat with its high ceilings, desired by many but not me because it makes it even harder to heat the flat. Last night I slept in tracksuit bottoms and two tops, which for mid-September, even by my standards, is unusual.
Fun fact: I haven’t had a kebab for three years now, despite living right opposite one of south London’s finest kebab houses.
Those last two lines have been written just as Johnny Hates Jazz ‘Turn Back the Clock’ has come on in the café. I think this track was released in late ’87. While 80s music has a deservedly great reputation, I thought from the summer of ’87 to the end of that decade, until the brief rise of Madchester in late ’89, there was a real dip in the quality of music.
Anyway, I’m going to crack on with things this morning. There’s a woman over to my right, sat at the table I’ve normally occupied in recent weeks, a single two-seater which I’ve grown to like because Phil Collins, the waitress, will always come along and push another table next to it to give me the chance to spread out with my work (always appreciated). This woman had finished her latte when I arrived here just after 9:30hrs this morning. She hasn’t ordered anything since. This is beyond any elite-level hot beverage nursing I’ve pulled off in here over the years. A remarkable spectacle.
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