The predictable bad night’s sleep was followed by an early shower, October’s first, an absolute shrinker. That bathroom is so cold it just instils fear.
I then boarded the 322 bus to get to the café. Twice, twenty years apart, this single decker, whose Hail and Ride section south of West Norwood is a hellish experience (you can’t allow south Londoners, of all people, to dictate when a bus should stop), has been voted London’s worst bus by The Evening Standard and another local paper. As a 322 veteran, I can categorically state I have never been on a worse route. It’s like the worst bringer gigs on the circuit. You know the ones. They go on all night and have upwards of 20 acts a night and spring a bucket collection on you at the end of the night when really they ought to just charge an entry fee because, you know, there’s nothing wrong with people paying to watch Stand-Up.
This morning’s standout 322 villain was a track suited man in his early 70s. He had Capital Gold on full blast on an old school ghetto blaster and passengers were subjected to Tony Blackburn’s transatlantic tones, who’s clearly still going. Track Suit Man was really feeling the music, making impressive movements with his right arm, palm open. It was like he was telling the bus, “I really feel this music in ways you guys could never understand.”
Meantime, Seb K and Phil Collins, the little waitress who transitioned from kitchen staff to waiter in 2014, an initially bumpy process, but ultimately a resounding success (like Phil Collins when he stepped up from Genesis drummer to front man in the 70s) are manning the morning shift. With Seb K returning to Portugal for good next year, this great partnership is on borrowed time, so I’m just enjoying them while I can.
Mr and Mrs Chin Fissure, the couple who both have fissures and settled down to have a kid who has secured the dimpled chin for the next generation, are in. I gave them the ‘Morning’, which has been lost this side of the pandemic and which I’ve sought to revive with them. Mr Fissure is tucking into his usual sausage sandwich, a habit which I suspect will mean Mrs Fissure is closing out this life either as a widower for some years or with a guy that won’t have a fissure, unless the incomplete chin is a pre-requisite for her.
After greeting the Fissures, I removed the balaclava that my cousin gave me for Christmas 2013 and splashed water on my head in the gents to dampen down the balaclava-affected barnet. Another accident has left me with some cuts on my face, now healing, that forced me to cancel a gig this week as I just look silly right now. I have a gig tomorrow night and don’t think I’ll have the speedy beard growth, or depth, to disguise the injury, a result of some DIY gone seriously wrong in the last few days. It’ll probably be a couple of weeks before I can shave. In the meantime, not for the first time, I look like a dick.
Also in the café is High Forehead, the local barber, who’s still got the pierced eyebrow despite getting on in years. Back in the early 2010s, High Forehead opened his second barbers on this road and curiously stuck his email address on the shop front in large signage. Hotmail too, which always unsettles me. One of my rules is ‘never do business with anyone that uses a Hotmail address’. Anyway, I’d never seen this before. Who will drop their barber an email to arrange a haircut? I mean, it’s not some swanky salon. It’s a barbershop.
These days. High Forehead has the Hotmail address off the shop front. Sometimes I feel him looking at my hair when we’re in here, quietly seething that at no point I’ve never gone to him for a haircut. If after 20 years, I finally turned up at his barbers, he might not be able to stop himself asking why I waited over two decades before giving him an opportunity. But if I did ever venture into his premises and place my skull in his nicotine-smelling hands, I’d ask him, “Hey, remember when you have the Hotmail sign up on your shop front? Did anyone ever email you for an appointment?”
The big reason for never giving High Forehead my custom is simply because we come to the same café. If, after trying him, I didn’t like his work, we’d have had that awkward moment of him then seeing me roll up with another haircut from elsewhere and it might have got his back up. It would’ve been easily noted as I tend to go long periods without a haircut owing to an aversion of SMALL talking with barbers. I find when they screw up your hair, if you’ve established a good rapport with them, you can’t then pull them up on some tonsorial fault.
Wrapping up today’s café bulletin, just after 9am, a Portuguese couple, mid-forties perhaps but older looking because of the smoking that has a hold on the SW8 community, came in and took up a window seat. The woman, in an impressive mustard yellow jumper and grey dungarees undermined the sartorial elegance with some prolonged open-mouthed coughing, which she might want to work on before the next Covid variant emerges this winter.
Meantime, café favourites, Old Twitter, breaking yesterday’s news today with their old school newspapers (they take turns reading the headlines to one another and summarising the stories) turned up a quarter of an hour later and tucked into hearty English breakfasts. Mrs Old Twitter has this intriguing tongue-poking visual going on whenever she squeezes brown sauce onto her plate, the tongue creeping out, usually on the left side of her mouth, between tightly-pursed lips.
I wish I could love being at home a tenth as much as I love being in this place.
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