The posh schools have already broken up for the summer and driving through Dulwich Village it’s very quiet. I wonder if the college has a Specials tribute band? They should for the Summer at least, and Autumn and Christmas and the New Year skiing season.
I am wearing my Paul Smith suit.
Bored during the prayers, I reach into my inside pocket and pull out the order of service for my father’s funeral two years earlier.
Crossing the road in the dark at a set of traffic lights, I am surprised by a tug on the arm.
Is daughter in dead grandmother’s fake fur coat and DMs.
Bottle of wine under her arm.
I want to go to the top of the hill and down the other side. Sorry, I’m new, the cab driver says, I only started yesterday. It’s a straight line, I say, from here to there. Three miles max. But I can use my Tom Tom, he says.
sitting in his car, engine running, window down, hands cupped to his chin, whistling elegant birdsong to a house across the road.
The bear tried to race me and I tried to race the speedy Rastafarian.
The speedy Rastafarian came in first and the bear came last.
Yes.
both wearing pink cowboy hats, standing outside the pub across the road, Race For Life numbers still pinned to their chests, smoking as if their life depended upon it.
Later, one of them falls over, flat on her back.
So I went to pick Willa up from her friend’s birthday party.
In the car I said, ‘so what do M’s parents do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but her dad had one line in a Harry Potter film.’
by a man driving a people carrier who was, perhaps, taking the GIVE BLOOD sticker in his back window a little too literally. A minute later I passed a personal trainer walking very slowly. I knew he was a personal trainer, because it said so, in Helvetica, on the back of his sweatshirt. Which made me think of Gerard Depardieu as Mann mit dem T-Shirt in The Left-Handed Woman.
It says, on the side of the packet of supermarket own-brand pasta.
And you just know that there was a focus group.
And that the head of the table has been sleeping with an intern.
And that the guy charged with writing the words has a weekend coke habit that is out of control.
It is axiomatic, as our friend Valya is want to say.
