I had a very busy morning, having to travel into the West End for a meeting today There was a time when I practically lived there from the age of 16, jumping on the Northern Line at Clapham North, all the way to Tottenham Court Road, but since around 2010, I’ve barely been there. Like anywhere when you’ve been away a long time, I barely recognise it. I’ll always miss my Friday night trips to the old Virgin Megastore’s comic bookshop. I actually preferred it to the nearby Forbidden Planet. It was from here back in November 1988 that I bought Issue 428 of Batman, Part 3 (of 4) of ‘A Death in the Family’, the issue that confirmed that the second Robin (Jason Todd) had indeed died at the hands of The Joker following a hugely controversial telephone poll.
The journey in became complicated by a long-standing diversion heading northbound on Whitehall that I ought to have factored into my journey, as it’s caused me problems getting to gigs in the last few months. I sat on the bus, fixated on my scarf. I’ve never really been a great knotter of scarves. My knotting technique remains poor, apart from a brief, halcyon period back in 2004 when scarves with a slightly askew knot became a thing as a result of the then young dynamo Jose Mourinho in his first spell as Chelsea manager. Scarf sales went through the roof for UK males that winter, I’m sure.
Rather than worrying too much about arriving late to my meeting, I was more concerned with buying some sharpies today which I need to bullet point some new stand-up material. Stationery does get me excited in a way few things do. The idea is to bullet point the new material on some A5, with the sharpie, and stick the A5 on the wall so I can have it as a reference when rehearsing. I stopped off in Rymans on Lower Regent Street and picked up the sharpies, turning up 12 minutes late for my meeting.
The guy I met at the meeting had a curious handshake. It was very firm, old school in that respect, but the release was so slow, even extending, some might say, to some cupping, my hand held in his for a few moments post-handshake. Even the exit handshake was similar.
I arrived in the back-up café to find my Has-To-Sit-At-The-Same-Table doppelgänger actually sitting elsewhere. It must’ve been killing him to miss out on his table and sure enough, he’s just left. Even when I’ve seen his table right at the back of the back-up café free (it’s by the loos too – why are the best spots always by the loos?), I’ve never sat there. In 20 years of coveting the same (toilet) table in THE café, I knew how disappointed, crushed even, I was whenever I arrived to find it taken so out of respect for his OCD, I never take it.
In front of me, a table of what sounds like four young American mums are discussing the most popular breast-feeding ‘poses’ in the world. I didn’t know it was a thing. But why wouldn’t it be? I mean you, the reader, would you ever think that Star Wars Football is a thing? And yet this substack is put together by a man who’s been running the world’s only Star Wars Football League for four decades now, something else that’s probably contributed to ending up single.
I’ve just about recovered from yesterday’s visit to my aunt and uncle’s. There’d been a bust up, this time over my uncle’s refusal to allow my aunt to take her new walker with her as he doesn’t feel she knows how to get it on and off the bus. I suspect he might have a point, but still, if she can be shown... My aunt, inevitably, wasn’t having any of it and tempers had yet to cool by the time I turned up.
Things took a turn for the worse when my uncle once again remarked on her tendency to make what he calls (in Spanish) bedroom noises every time she takes the stairs in the flat these days or bends down to pick anything up. “The neighbours must think I’m on Viagra,” said my uncle. He’s been trying to get my aunt to curb these suggestive noises but she just feels she’s in so much discomfort these days that she needs the noises. Without them, there’s no way she’s making it up and down those stairs. My uncle, meantime, feels like he can’t look his neighbours in the eye.
I should disclose I have a fringe today. Unintentional. It’s just the way it is. It’s never a good look. Back in the mid-00s, around the time of the ‘Mourinho scarf knot’, I deliberately cultivated a fringe one summer because I knew my then girlfriend couldn’t tolerate it. I was that unhappy in the relationship that I figured, correctly, that if I kept the fringe (despite her fierce opposition to it), she would soon give me the boot. And so it turned it out. So, there’s something to be said for the fringe. Of course, these days there is no partner. Not even an invisible one. I think I can see it as progress that I barely even talk to myself in the flat these days. But again, the fringe is unlikely to alter my personal circumstances.
In other news, a rather fragrant elderly customer has just, mercifully, left the café. He really got my fifth nose tingling there. It’s a super sensitive nose. Surgery does that to you.
I’m due a free coffee today. I have to say, I dislike the SMALL talk that transaction requires.
Oh, still no sign of Double Denim.
Has he really gone?
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