The McDonald’s at the Gates of Dawn and other stories
Loneliness, London and the lost art of falling over
This Machine Sells Out
This Machine Kills Wasps on February 8th has sold out, thanks so much to everyone who bought tickets.
My band The Highchurches have acquired a third member, and we are working hard on learning our own songs in time for the show.
Next Level Sketch on Wednesday!
If you own a bum and would like to use it, we still have seats available for our sketch show at Hoopla in London Bridge tomorrow. See you there?
The McDonald’s at the Gates of Dawn
There is nothing brighter than McDonald’s at 6:30am on a Tuesday morning.
Even the sun can’t compare with the corporate need for linger-lessening lighting.
Gotta keep the turnover high for those apple turnovers.
The problem is the people in this restaurant don’t have anywhere else to go.
And so the great-gran nurses her coffee for another hour.
A septuagenarian speeds through her puzzle book with the efficiency determination of office busywork.
The homeless people who camp outside Aldi scoot in and out to get warm or use the toilet, the staff showing basic kindness by allowing this to happen.
Brighton in the winter pre-dawn is a cruel and lonely place. Even the people’s canteen, Wetherspoons, won’t open for another hour.
And the cold wind blows in off the sea.
London will eat itself
This weekend I returned to London, a place I (sort of) lived for thirty years.
This time I was there for pet sitting, and to see some friends who were lucky or wealthy enough to achieve a permanent foothold in the city that never loses.1
It hits differently now.
For the first time, it feels like somewhere I visit, rather than somewhere I belong.
Getting off the train at Victoria amid the madcap wheelie suitcases of the Gatwick Express, my walk still increases to capital pace.
I still reach the barriers before anyone else.
I still know the subterranean short cuts, and where to stand to guarantee myself a seat on the tube.
Where not to look and how not to behave.
Emerging from Oxford Circus tube2 into Soho, I was reminded of my time as a cargo bike courier, seeing the city anew, from angles and alleys I never knew existed.
And seeing that it was broken.
Six months after this bike logistics work, I was in a new job, more in line with the implications of my accent.
In the course of this, I found myself in a meeting with Sadiq Khan, trying to figure him out.
To understand whether he was using the inspirational figurehead of the small charity I was working for as cheap PR…
… or if he was serious about the problems we cared about and that he had the mandate and the power to fix.
He shook my hand.
“Comms person, eh? I should get myself one of those.”
His eyes twinkled, but I’ve still no idea what he believes.
There are things about London I miss.
Brighton can feel very white and provincial, because it is.
This makes me feel uncomfortable, despite my own extreme whiteness, as I grew up in places that were multicultural before we even had that word, never mind had it weaponised against us.3
Walking along a south London high street near midnight, I can see old Afro-Caribbean blokes getting their hair cut.
I pass subterranean cafes filled with plastic chairs, dominos, and good cheer.
Hear idiot boy racers speeding up and down past the eternal roadworks in their shit Audis, and almost feel nostalgic for them.
It still feels like home, even though it isn’t.
Falling Over / Having a Fall
In early 2020, my dad tripped on the kerb, and broke both of his shoulders.
Worse was to come that year, for both my family and the wider world, but I thought of that incident on Sunday, when I fell over very awkwardly.
I had been walking up and down the bough of a felled tree in Crystal Palace park, as it was located in a secluded copse and I was trying to learn my lines without joggers glaring at me.
My right foot slipped into the gap between two branches, and I fell backwards and to my right, twisting my foot to a fairly dangerous angle in the process.
I was lucky enough to half break my fall on another branch. So at this point I was on my back in pseudo-mid-air, with my foot stuck at a weird angle in the bough ahead of me.
Had I not managed to break my fall, my leg or foot would almost certainly have broken.
I had to gradually push and pull myself back up onto the branch, to the point where I could loosen my foot.
My dad is a spritely seventy something, and I would still consider the pre-Covid incident as him falling over, rather than having a fall.
Sunday reminded me it’s a fine line, like a late era Paul McCartney single.
It’s a good job I don’t own a bath.
An also to see a fellow exile - Bella - over briefly from Istanbul. Hello, love.
Argyll Street exit, the only acceptable one.
I was living in Whitechapel when the far right started calling it a “no-go area” for non-Muslims. Fascism is fear and cowardice.