The morning after the long trek to a gig and back the night before. I used my local overground station to get there, the first time I’ve used it in the 8 years I’ve been in this place. I’m just not a train guy, particularly the overground which I’ve long associated with travelling to places or living in locations that are just not built up enough for me, someone that grew up in what these days effectively amounts to central London. Unfortunately, an otherwise straight-forward journey last night was complicated hugely by Kingston station being closed.
I returned home around 2300hrs and watched the second half of Liverpool v Man City (a repeat of my 1979 Subbuteo FA Cup Final) having avoided hearing the result. I was pleasantly surprised that Liverpool got the win. It’s clearly a team in some transition as it was more of a backs-to-the-wall performance against City rather than another of those peak-Klopp era dismantling of Guardiola’s men that only Liverpool can consistently put together. Salah’s goal though has to be one of the best of his many in a Liverpool shirt. Not sure about the highlights in his hair too, hair that is strikingly similar to that of Liverpool’s greatest ever number 11, the incomparable Graeme Souness.
On the football, I do struggle to watch Chelsea and Brentford games simply because their respective managers open-mouthed gum chewing winds me up something chronic. Thomas Frank, the Brentford boss, he’s out on his own though as an open-mouthed masticator. Even during the brief mass brawl, he co-instigated at their Saturday game against Brighton, he was doing his confrontational thing open mouthed.
I’m gigging tonight in Piccadilly and looking forward to it. I had a great gig last Friday night. One of them nights that reminds you why you’re doing this, though the improv section, as anticipated, was a disaster for me.
At Friday’s gig I met a very old friend for the first time in 30+ years. It was lovely to see her again and to meet her husband for the first time. I could be wrong, but I felt like I clicked with him right away. This side of the pandemic, even the introvert in me has learned the importance of human contact and I never thought at this age, I’d be meeting and making new friends. I have a rule. If I meet someone five times now, they’re down as potential candidates for pall bearing duty at my unpaid for funeral.
I don’t usually have people coming to gigs, and the improv finale was bothering me a lot. I thought it was sod’s law I’d have friends coming to a night when chances were I could get my behind handed to me, but I put in a good enough performance with my normal set to be able to disregard the improv horror. I continued to fret all night whether my friends were having a good night and every time I saw them chuckling at the other acts, I relaxed. You want people to enjoy themselves, right?
Everything about the night was unusual, in a good way, and I told my friends that in no way did that represent the average stand up gig in my experience. It can be a very solitary thing, travelling to and from gigs, waiting to go on, but Friday was a very enjoyable night in several different ways.
Meantime, here in the café, I didn’t get my favourite table. I arrived just after 10.30hrs, and with the café busy, I sat opposite Future Me at the next two-seater table. I made sure I waited until he finished his big breakfast before SMALL talking with him. My table today is one of those annoying wobbly ones.
I hope FM appreciates that I never spoke to him as he tucked into his food, as his manner does make it clear he doesn’t like to engage in chat while eating. I’m the same. Though being a writer, I don’t get too many opportunities to tuck into artery-hardening cooked breakfasts these days.
It's only the hardcore smokers now sitting outside with their tobacco or vapers. They’ll be out there in all kinds of weather, such is their commitment to the habit.
On my way here, walking past a bus top, I noticed loads of bedding and bags of personal effects at a bus stop, all strewn on a filthy floor, much the same way clothes are left outside charity shops. I wouldn’t say I was shocked, as it’s not an unusual sight in London these days, but I was certainly thrown briefly to note movement under the bedding. Someone is sleeping there.
Future Me, who lives opposite this bus stop, told me this morning that it’s a young girl who arrived at the bus stop on Saturday night. Some neighbour is apparently heading to a Vauxhall hostel this morning to report the situation in the hope they can get the girl some accommodation.
After Future Me went on his way, telling me Plymouth are still top of League One, Phil Collins, the little waitress, wiped down his table and pushed it next to mine to give me the 4-seater and the extra space. That gesture is always appreciated.
I’m old enough to remember the old Cardboard City in Waterloo in the early 90s. I only walked through it during its fag end days and it was quite an intimidating place. A mini-city of homeless people and, well, lots of cardboard. Thankfully we’ve not seen anything like that in London since, but here in south London, Brixton and Camberwell especially of my regular haunts, the amount of homeless I’ve been seeing on the streets the last four or five years is a step up on anything I’d seen since that late Thatcher/early major era.
God help me with my OCDs if I ever end up in that situation. With my dread of filth, I’d need to learn how to hover off the floor if I were to be sleeping outdoors, and also, I’d need to find a way to keep the bedding off Lambeth’s filthy pavements.
London 2022.
The gap between the wealthy and the lower classes is just vast now.
The 2012 Raconteur, a Bob Dylan lookalike with one of those pointless Zappa tufts under his bottom lip (why not just grow a beard of some kind?) has arrived. He’s some sort of lawyer, I think, unofficially or officially. Some of his advice to ‘clients’ strikes me as something learned in books, perhaps during some prison stretch or other.
Raconteur 2012 asks Phil Collins what their soup of the day is.
“Cabbage”.
“Cabbage,” he repeats, putting on some faux-Iberian accent to connect with her. “Do you have any vegan stuff?”
“No.” Phil doesn’t mess around with the SMALL talk.
Raconteur 2012 notes the cabbage soup includes meat.
“Can I have the cabbage soup but without the meat?”
Phil Collins fixes him with a quizzical look. No one’s going to be scooping out the meat from the soup, so Raconteur 2012 gets his cabbage soup.
“No.”
Like I said, Phil doesn’t do the SMALL talk.
The ‘client’ arrives. Raconteur 2012 discusses the soup quandary. “I find a little bit of potato in a soup can elevate it to the next level. Pumpkin, even.”
The soup analysis is then overshadowed by some disappointing talk from him, at the top of his voice – he clearly wants the café to hear these views – which surprise me, because without knowing him, having heard him raconteuring over the years in here, I never had him down as a dinosaur. He tells his client how many of the CEOs now in energy companies are women – I have no idea if this is true, by the way – and that there are more and more female CEOs now, but in his words, “They’re just fronts. No woman CEO actually runs the company.” He offers no evidence to back this up.
Phil Collins brings his soup over.
Cabbage.
They haven’t picked the meat out.
Raconteur 2012 and his outdated views are stopped in their tracks. He looks aghast at the meat in his bowl.
“You heard me say ‘no meat’, right?” He asks his disinterested client who reeks of weed.
Raconteur 2012 raises his chin, that ridiculous crest of hair under the bottom lip (once memorably described to me by a gay Canadian guy who had one too as a ‘cum-catcher’) catching the eye once again, but Phil Collins has long disappeared. If he thinks the café are going to make a cabbage-only soup just for him, he’s as deluded as his views on female CEOs.
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