A little girl in a tutu eats a biscuit sitting on her father’s shoulders.
A man walks down Percy Street holding two pineapples, one in each hand – a pack of mint in his shirt pocket.
A woman waits for the bus. In one hand a headless lamp, in the other one a huge empty bottle of champagne.
A man tucks in his box of discounted chicken outside Sainsbury’s in Camden.
A girl on the tube holds three teddy bears with floral hats on – the fabric getting caught in her red fingernails.
An old man carries his old radio around playing God only knows dragging an empty carrier bag, looking in his pockets for God only knows what and talking to himself.
A guy in a yellow shirt with planes jives in a liquor store, his dame wears a yellow flower in her hair.
Most days I’m there to take the frame and yet manage to stay out of it. Then some days the objects of my observations turn around to communicate with me; maybe our one common identity – that of the Londoner – is what brings us together for a moment.
Like the lady sitting next to me at Starbuck’s in Waterloo station quietly reading her copies of free magazines while I was sipping my coffee watching people come in and out. She passed the first copy on to me and when she left, she handed me the rest and smiled as if she had done a good deed.
And the old gentleman who was walking his dogs around Camden Square and guessed by my excitement when I played with his pug and labrador that I must have had pets at some point and loved them very much. Who also guessed as he said that I must have studied law – and lo and behold, he was right about all of the above.
There’s a secret code sometimes between us. Something that makes people turn around in the direction of a fellow Londoner’s gaze when he’s stopped in the middle of Russel Square looking at something and smiling a full blown smile. And it’s a dog crazily chasing after a remote control car in circles making everyone giggle.
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Now if this post sounds too soppy and sugary sweet, gimme a couple of days. Once the clouds and rain are back, it’s all going to be a rant about bloody late buses and imaginary droughts.
If you read my recent post on my walking commute musings, you might have noticed a snap of one of my favourite parts of London: the Duck Island cottage. The thing is… ever since I moved to Westminster in 2013, I simply cannot get enough of St James’s Park. So since this love has manifested itself in a myriad pictures, I thought I should do a post just on that: an album of my best snaps of the Park all through the seasons to mark my second anniversary living in SW1.
