One of modern literature's great characters, coffee, train cancellations, no-shorts and more.
Sweating the SMALL stuff
I was on my way to my first Brighton gig yesterday evening when a quick check on my phone as I boarded my bus in Brixton showed me that all the London Bridge Thameslink trains that would’ve got me to my gig on time had been cancelled. Reluctantly, I turned back and headed home, but not before a trip to Lidhell’s in Camberwell. Of the three super-rude Lidhell stores in my muck-heavy corner of south London, this one, Stockwell and the formidable Brixton store, it’s quite possible the Camberwell store is the rudest of the lot.
The general feel of these stores is not simply that the customer ISN’T always right, which is commendable, I think, because customers can be dicks, but in Lidhell, the customer is NEVER right. Camberwell seems to take that to the extreme though, the staff seemingly taking their lead from this heavily inked middle-aged Italian woman who, having dealt with her a number of times, is particularly obnoxious.
Taking his cue from the Italian yesterday, one of her colleagues overseeing the self-checkout queue, which was the only queue in operation yesterday evening, announced to customers, “All right, you guys seem to be hard of hearing so I’ll say it again: anyone for card payments, wake up.”
The reason customers might not have been listening is because the only way to perhaps handle being stuck in their interminable queues is to pretend you’re not actually there. Something in your brain shuts down, the body going into survival mode. Every time I’m in these stores, I tell myself that at some point tonight, I’ll be in my bed, unable to sleep as usual, but the Lidhell ‘experience’ will be over.
After watching last night’s Champions League qualifier between Rangers and PSV (it was an hour before I realised PSV weren’t Feyenoord, at which point I stopped wondering why Feyenoord had strayed from their classic red, white and black harlequin design (number 85 in classic Subbuteo), I picked up Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’. A prolific reader, I get through a couple of books a week, but I’ve sat on this one for several years, partly because the text is a little too small for me these days, even with glasses.
I’ve always felt guilty about being so slow to get through this massive novel and have made a concerted effort in the last week or so, becoming fully aware now that I am reading something so extraordinary that I will never forget it, even if I wanted to. One of its central characters, arguably its lead in what is a very strong ensemble, is Jude, this disabled, self-harming highly successful lawyer. Jude is a tragic and compelling character. I know already I am reading one of the greatest characters I have ever read in any book, up there with the likes of Fosco in Collins’ The Woman in White, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, Alfred Jingle in Dickens’s very funny The Pickwick Papers. I could go on listing my favourite literary creations, but the mind isn’t quite working right now.
The word ‘devastating’ is listed on the blurb to A Little Life and though still only at the halfway point of the book, I can see why. It’s an uncomfortable work, deeply affecting and if I’m feeling like this at only the halfway point, how will I feel at the end? Clearly, it’s not going to end well for Jude.
Last night would’ve been my first gig in 8 days, the longest I’ve gone without doing a show since returning to stand-up in February after many years away. I can see why some comics get worried when they haven’t gigged for a week or so. There is a rustiness that kicks in, but my rehearsals went well, and I was confident I would’ve done well last night at what frustratingly had turned out to be a sold out show.
I’m back gigging tomorrow night in my old Clapham neighbourhood, debuting a new set which I’m excited about. I’ve learned it now and plan to rehearse it again on this evening’s run.
After another sleepless night last night, 3am seemingly my body’s favoured waking up time this summer, I listened to this new-to-me US show on the genealogy of the Americas in an effort to get to sleep, but anything on lineage is something I’m really fascinated by, so there was little chance of me dozing off to that.
This morning, I found myself irritated by another item on the radio on the deeply worrying cost of living crisis – I’m not seeing beyond winter right now – and what particularly ‘got my goat’ was that Labour’s Yvette Cooper, one of the good MPs, again, as people tend to do, referenced how families will struggle to put food on the table this winter. This really annoys me. Why is it always families that are mentioned as struggling? What about living on your own, with just a single income coming into the flat? How are YOU going to survive? Why do we need to make these distinctions? As someone who chose an unconventional life, who never had any lingering interest in getting married, and less so, in having kids (if thirty years from now they were banking on a Substack newsletter getting them out of financial trouble, where’s the progress in that?), why are people like me so disregarded? Do I only matter if I had chosen to continue the lineage?
Heading to the first choice back-up café this morning helped calm down my ire. Or rather a call from my aunt distracted me. The two combined, I guess, to pull me back from the jaw jut.
My aunt told me that her and my uncle had apparently gone shopping to get my uncle some trunk-like shorts to see out the heatwave, despite the likelihood it’s now over. Discussing their requirements with a shop assistant in their poor English, they apparently returned with a pack of what they thought were three pairs of shorts for £8, which is a great deal in any era, only to find that what my uncle had in fact been sold was underwear.
Nothing about this surprises me. My aunt claims this only happened because her and my uncle are now at an age where they make mistakes and these things are happening to them. I disagree. This could’ve happened to them at any point and any year since they first arrived in London back in 1965 and failed to significantly build on their eight words of English. They are a chaotic pair.
Over the years, there has been a tendency for any shorts that haven’t fitted my uncle to come my way. I’m hoping this underwear, which I understand my uncle isn’t enthused with, doesn’t follow that hand-me-down trail, particularly as my uncle has tried a pair on. How would I know which of them he’s tried? Don’t answer that, please.
I arrived in the back-up café this morning with my laptop, determined to have a morning focused on the writing. Inevitably, it didn’t quite happen. Since the stand-up took over my creative life, the old creative writing has suffered. I’m trying to fix that and have been trying to do this during my café’s August closure. It’s been partly successful, but I still need to do more.
I was all set up for a good morning in the café. The younger waiter, unshaven and bespectacled, had given me a great smile soon as I walked in. “Latte?” He said.
He knows my order already. I’m easy to read.
Steve McManaman, his older colleague with the leather bands, brought over my latte plus a glass of water. The water was a nice touch. I hadn’t asked for it, and the heat wave is over. But hey, a nice touch, belated or not, is a nice touch. McManaman has a distinctive delivery style, head down, the pupils of his eyes almost in the back of the head as he fixes you with his friendliest look which is actually a little too intense.
The two-seater tables are bigger than the tables in my café, allowing me to spread out, but I am such a ‘spreader’ that even this table was struggling to contain all my notebooks, printed documents, multiple glass cases and what have you.
Over to my right, an elderly white gentleman, in his early eighties, with closely cropped hair and a green t-shirt, caught the eye with a mid-90s era Celtic tattoo on the left side of his neck, half swallowed up by the wrinkling.
I’d made sure that this time I faced in the direction of the counter, making it easier to put in my orders. When I ordered my second latte, from the younger waiter (he’s very smiley), he made this whirly gesture with both hands, the kind made by footballers and/or trainers in the direction of the dugout when a player is injured and needs to come off.
This was my fifth trip, I think, to this back-up café and it’s evident now that the dominant customer, at least during the day, is the middle-class mum and their regal toddlers. One of them had a giant double-buggy with them today, sitting one toddler and their elder sibling, and for some reason, once the infants had been deposited in their high chairs, the mum kept pushing the empty buggy right into the back of my chair. A little irked by this, I questioned myself whether I was a grumpy bugger or whether it was reasonable to be annoyed that somebody could be impervious to how annoying they were being.
The dominance of toddlers in this café means that right now, there is an absence of the type of characters I have enjoyed seeing and writing about in the SW8 café for over two decades. Who knows, maybe circa 2050, these toddlers will have developed into characters to rival those in South Lambeth. If the premonition I had when I was just eight-years-old is correct, and I do live until 2053, I’ll still be around to see a bit of this.
After posting this, the plan is to head out for another run. It’s currently raining but after toiling in the sun lately, I don’t mind a bit of rain and am hoping for a 10k.
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