I have this side of the pandemic spent a fair bit of time looking back at its impact on me, as maybe you have. Its impact on you, rather than me, I mean. Otherwise, it would be weird if you were concerning yourself with what it had done to me.
As one of life’s introverts, the novelty of the pandemic early on, the fact that it must’ve been a horrendous time for the EXTROVERTS and that for once, the introverts were better suited to this world, that kind of worked for me. The hoarding, those selfish b**tards stripping the shelves of everything, including the hand gel which I’d been buying since the 90s, were a real irritant, but that aside, I thought I didn’t mind that strange new world we were all now living in. But the last few weeks, looking back at that week in late March 2020 when we went into our first ever lockdown, I can see how much damage it did to me, physically and mentally. I could never go back to that. There have of course been subsequent lockdowns and reading the media today, it may be there’s another one come the end of the year, with the World Cup, a winter one this year, likely to be a super spreader event, especially when England are playing, but surely, it’s highly unlikely we never live through anything like March 2020 again.
My life by the spring of 2020 had pretty much shrunk to daily visits to the South Lambeth Portuguese café I’d been going to for 20 years by then, the one place where I’ve always been able to shut out the noise. And then all of a sudden, I lost that for 13 months and I worried nearly every day if the café would survive the lockdowns. In the end, I lost my (toilet) table, gone I’m assuming because its proximity to the toilets from where the regulars usually emerge with their unwashed hands made it the most dangerous table in the café, and while I miss that table terribly, it’s a small loss compared to what could’ve happened.
When I returned to the café in April 2021, finally, after what was then 21 years (though there are only a couple of members of staff who precede my time there as a regular), I decided to share my name with staff. Most of them forgot it, but one or two, while surprised that after keeping myself to myself for so long I went down that more open route, have remembered it, and as I’ve slowly attempted to rebuild my life, those interactions with these members of staff, and them knowing my name, has helped me in some small way cope with the isolation that has held my life in a tight, cold grip since my last relationship ended four years ago.
This last year I’ve made a good effort to re-engage with some old friends and also made some new friends. Not many, but it’s been a start and it had been a while since I’d made some. When you’re young, it’s so easy to make new pals. Even I had a big circle going into my early twenties and then something started to happen. I went from being a kid in his late teens who seemed, briefly, to have enough charisma to organise nights out that would be attended by people years older than me, to just becoming this very quiet, awkward character with a small circle of close friends and inclined to exclude myself from so many events that might’ve been fun. I think being so driven and obsessed with succeeding as a writer played a huge part in that, as did the abrupt manner of losing my parents. It’s cost me a lot. All too often I put life on hold to work at my craft. It didn’t need to be like that. Girlfriends couldn’t get a look in. The writing always came first.
Despite these recent improvements to my social life, and of course, gigging several nights a week also helps me get out the flat now, it’s still the case that most of my interactions came with the café staff and regulars. All too often, those are the only people I speak with, such has been the extent of my isolation, so I’ve come to place huge value on those interactions. And most of the time, it really is just the ‘Hello’, but that’s all it needs to be. That’s enough to tell me that ‘Hey, I exist. These people can see me.’
It would be wrong to completely credit the pandemic with my (late) mid-life morphing from introvert to amateur raconteur. The turning point as far as the café went was New Year’s Day 2015. It was morning, I’d taken an early bus to the café after a horrendous New Year’s Eve (my least favourite night of the year) and I can’t recall now if it happened as I was leaving or arriving, but I do remember that an erstwhile regular and SW8 staple, a former football hooligan and one hell of a unit who you wouldn’t be able to beat in a fight even if you were given a thousand years to do it, simply wished me a ‘Happy New Year’. I gave it back. It was a big moment. We’d been seeing one another five-six days a week for 15 years by then in the café and rarely exchanged a word. From that moment on, it changed.
I’d often see him early mornings as I arrived at the café, usually their first customer of the day, the little waitress allowing me to duck in under the shutter just before they officially opened at 8am. The café regular would be walking home to his mum’s where he was holed up after the end of his marriage, several large sticks of French bread in a bag, and we’d stop for a chat. I’ve seen him this side of the pandemic, and unfortunately these days he’s forgotten my name. That happens, a lot. Often, I get called ‘David’ for some reason. I don’t know why that happens. But to have someone know my name, and then forget it, when I haven’t forgotten theirs, I don’t know, that’s disappointing.
Through this man, I was introduced to one or two other characters, north African regulars, one of whom now has my number and chats to me every day in the café. In fact, he doesn’t stop chatting. He’s nice, if by his own admission slightly unhinged as a result of the weed he puffs every night, and he’s always dispensing words of wisdom which make sense, but which being built the way I am, I find difficult to put into practice. He’s also on at me about my lack of sleep and ways to fix it. Just this week he told me to squeeze onion juice into a glass and down it last thing at night, and then in the mornings, to guzzle olive oil mixed with garlic. Firstly, the price of olive oil is rocketing, so I’m not going to start drinking the stuff when my stocks are limited. Secondly, this guy, on the one hand he tells me I need to find a woman because it’s not good to be on your own, even though he’s been on his own for over two decades. And on the other, he’s telling me to drink horrendous concoctions that are hardly going to help me find anyone, if I was minded to. Which to be perfectly honest, I’m not. If it happens, it happens. But it’s not a priority. The priority is to try and keep the head clear and the body healthy and to try and finally nail down a better work/life balance.
The point is, I’d been opening up a bit to people a fair bit in the café before the pandemic brought about this late pseudo-epiphany. It’s important for me to remember that. There are so many regulars I talk to in there, but equally, there are regulars who have been there since I first walked into the café on the afternoon of Sunday 15th August 2001 who I’ve yet to exchange a single word with, and clearly, after 23 summers now, it’s never going to happen. If it did, we’d probably have to acknowledge how we ignored one another for 22 years. Which of us would bring that up? Maybe making light of it, laughing about it, that would be the way forward.
The ‘no-hello’ isn’t a problem for me inside the café, but when we see one another on the street, I always find that a little awkward. I still don’t give the ‘hello’ because it’s pointless. We haven’t exchanged the ‘hello’ inside the café where our paths cross every day. It would be odd to do it externally. And what if we were suddenly greeting one another outside the café but continued to ignore one another inside? That would make no sense at all. Better just to continue ignoring one another.
Stranger than all that though, for me, is when you have briefly been on speaking terms with someone and then time and distance puts paid to that, and the next time you see them, you both pretend not to know one another. I mean sometimes you look to break that over-familiarity. You welcome it. For instance, there was one time when I was working for The Man in a ridiculously high-pressured job, and the payroll guy and I used to take the same bus. We’d talk in the office, occasionally, whenever there was some issue that had arisen with my pay. That was unavoidable. But on the upper deck of the northbound number 2 bus that I boarded across the road from the café in the mornings, we had an unspoken understanding that he would sit towards the back of the bus, and so I’d sit at the front. I’d never glance to the back of the bus as I boarded, knowing he’d be there. We both understood the drill. I hope he respected how good I was at making it all work. He lucked in with me.
I’d also usually allow him to disembark first. We never acknowledged that we often travelled in on the same bus. Even after I left that job, that bus has remained a staple of my life and the weeks and months after I moved on from that Victoria-based job were for me all about avoiding travelling early on the number 2 so I didn’t run into that guy and we didn’t extend the pretence to ‘we’ve never met before, we’ve never worked together before’. It worked.
Just this morning, walking northbound on South Lambeth Road, I crossed the road to avoid this small bespectacled Portuguese man (most of them of a certain generation are small) in double denim (most of them wear double denim) that I used to work with in another job. He worked in the post room, and I was introduced to him one time when I was trying to locate some parcels whose delivery I’d again messed up. We got to kind of know one another. We talked about the café, though he was and remains a regular in a rival café in the area, as well as a regular at one of the numerous betting shops in the area. This guy, with a shock of fuzzy grey hair, was ex-military and has the most fantastic menacing walk, with the classic upright bearing of the former soldier. To be fair to him, as soon as I left the job, that was it for him. He began ignoring me on South Lambeth whenever we ran into one another. It was like we’d never met. It was ruthless, but it worked for me. I admired him for that. The idea in these circumstances is to quash that familiarity until after time, some years usually, you tend to forget where you’d met. While we haven’t spoken for a dozen years, I see him at least once a week and as soon I see that unmistakable walk, I’ll take a long cut, a short cut, whatever I need to take to get to the café, just to avoid him. But we had our ‘hellos’. Really, I suppose, all of those regulars I’ve never had the ‘hello’ with in the café, we should’ve at least exchanged the greeting once. It wouldn’t have killed us. Though given the level of my old introversion, it would’ve come close.
It doesn’t surprise me that it took becoming extremely isolated for a few years to draw this more open approach to life out of me. This confidence, this willingness to engage with people and enter into at the very least the SMALL talk which had long horrified me. I’m a quiet guy but I recognised I had to make some effort and that I needed that contact. I needed to feel like I was part of some community, however small my part in that community might be.
As one of my new friends told me some months ago, human contact is ‘nourishing’. I learned that very late. The importance of the ‘hello’, of giving it, and receiving it back, those moments have become precious to me and sometimes really do carry me through the day.
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