Nicknamed the ‘posho Euro’, he sat opposite me in a rooftop bar, chainsmoking. The cigarettes mustied the pashmina around his throat. The waitress came over. “Hello, yuz?” A Polish inflection. “I’ll have a whisky and soda, please.” He looked at me. “Oh, whithky and thoda? I love you awready,” a smile, a frank expression. He…
Category: London Characters
Characters – Ghost Sailor
Thirdly came the sailor. A chap. Youngish, lithe but grisly with brown hair, reddish about his face, falling down moplike about his ears. He was handsome and sat around the other side of the reservoir, near a slipway outside a tatty boathouse. Wearing dark overalls and latex gloves, he was hunched over an upturned topper,…
London Characters: Wispy Lady
The second character I happened across was a day after the first, whilst my father and I were cycling past an oast house set in deep countryside by a reservoir. I say ‘deep countryside’ but, as the astute reader knows, such hardly exists in the immediate bestrew of London, and so I ask graciously, with…
London Characters: Elvis
Yesterday, whilst I was in crisis, my father and I met a character. It was at The Anchor Tap, a quiet nook by the river, and I met my father there to reflect on the difficulties of the modern condition, its monotony, the repressive fatigue of working in London, enervation at the close of difficult…