I may look as if I'm here

This guy, shot from the upper deck of the 63 bus, stands on an old Roman road that leads to Canterbury. It’s the Old Kent Road. Can you imagine Chaucer’s pilgrims making their way along it, telling their ribald tales, if all their attention was directed at a tiny hand-held screen and its magical ability to connect us to elsewhere? Anywhere but here. 

Time, gentlemen

In a local cemetery, one of the head-stones refers to the deceased as ‘a gentle man’. We’re so used to the word ‘gentleman’ we don’t think about how it starts with ‘gentle’.

 

The term - gents - seems to belong to black and white movies, and it’s odd to describe the enterprise as a hairdressers rather than barbers. The forlorn business is just off Rye Lane in Peckham. Clad in black, it looks funereal and definitely out of time. No doubt it’ll be swept away like so many hair trimmings.

The cone and the crown

It’s been one of those days. This morning as I travelled on a bus through Rye Lane I saw a police operation… uniforms moving fast. Moments later a collection of limousines, the shiniest I’ve ever seen, parked outside Rye Lane Chapel on double-yellow lines. There was a funeral. Then, when I reached the West End I spotted Prince Charles in the back of a (shiny, of course it was shiny) black car (his presence announced by a police outrider blowing a whistle). But all this was topped by the sound and sight of a guy who looked like he lived on the street. There he was outside Oxford Circus Tube making music with a traffic cone. I kid you not. He blew into one end and out the other end came ‘Hey, Jude’ as if played on a trumpet, sort of. I didn’t have my camera. Shame. Loads of others did and an Irish guy said to me after he’d finished filming: ‘That’s going straight on YouTube.’ Lots of people tipped money into the inventive musician’s paper cup.