TWO WHEELS ON MY WAGON

I knew I was back in London. Cyclists tried to knock me over as I crossed the road on a green light and yelled ‘idiot’ after me as they passed within six inches of my nose. Young women, heads bent, engrossed in the phenomenon known as text messaging, bumped into me, cursed me, and zoomed away without apology. The occasional person who did catch my eye looked at me with such vehemence I wondered whether my flies were undone. The January morning was as grey as mushroom soup and the wind speared in from the Ilford marshes with enough intensity to make my eyes water. The streets were littered with dog-ends, cardboard coffee cups, newspapers, cigarette packets and the homeless. I had exited Euston Station at 07:30 and had walked along Gower Street, which has more blue plaques than Elvis Presley owned gold discs. I strolled along Oxford Street, past the execrescence that is Centre Point, down Charing Cross Road with its clutch of theatres, around Aldwych and out onto Trafalgar Square. A seagull sat on Nelson’s head. The four lions were asleep. Someone had erected a sort of sculpture on one of the plinths at the western end of the square. It was made up of transparent horizontal blue and yellow plastic shutters. It looked as much in keeping with the sweeping architecture of the place as a hot-dog stand in the foyer of the Savoy Hotel. I walked on, to St James’s Park. I needed a coffee. I had been dragging along behind me a case with two wheels and an extendable handle. Every time I stepped off a kerb the case whipped and twisted like Zebedee and I had the devil of a job getting it back on its wheels again. I felt like a hawker selling encyclopaedias. In the park, a few desultory pansies and polyanthuses bravely displayed a splash of colour, in contrast to the drab browns and greens which, mixed with the Milk of Magnesia sky, left me more than a little despondent. An information board told me how many species of bird could be viewed in the park. I am able to see most of them in my back garden, briefly, before they are devoured by cats. I entered the little wooden café there with great relief. I drank my coffee, sat on a weird chrome and bamboo seat, looking at the bare trees and the rooftops of Great George Street beyond for twenty minutes, before reluctantly getting up to leave. I noticed that the café was full of executives, probably talking about the latest calamity to befall Rio Tinto Zinc or Amalgamated Holdings. None of them was sporting a necktie. I happen to be a firm believer in a dress code that includes a tie so I made sure I straightened mine in front of them all, to ram the point home to these dressing-down bounders before I swept imperiously out of the café. I crept back a few minutes later for my case.