Lunch with an old friend

Transport for London was running what amounted to a Sunday service today, which essentially meant there were pitifully few tube trains available to take scores of families into Central London to shop in the sales. I went into town today and ended up with my nose pressed up against a tube train door with the woman behind me unwittingly (I hope) yet relentlessly pushing her bag into my bum.

And, of course, because the majority of people traveling today were out-of-towners, I had to endure several Northerners holding court about how grumpy Londoners are. Believe me: it doesn’t take many rides on the tube to realise that the only way to stay sane is to knuckle down and pretend you don’t exist. Small talk on public transport in London is actually traumatic rather than nice. One bloke got off the tube and shouted “love and joy” back into the carriage in a highly sarcastic manner. The man next to me mouthed a word back which sounded like banker.

Every time I get off the tube at Tottenham Court Road, I notice that they’ve pulled another building down. Today’s discovery was the demolition of the old Foyles building, no doubt to create luxury flats which will be bought-to-let by Russian oligarchs instead of the theatre performers who would probably benefit most from living in them. To compound the issue, the area around the tube has, yet again, become a Mecca for the homeless. Heaps of sleeping bags and cardboard boxes now surround the exit from the tube. The piles are so high that it’s impossible to know if there are people sleeping underneath. The network of underpasses around the Centre Point building were once so well known as a hang out for the homeless that they spawned a homeless charity. The designers of the tube were probably rubbing their hands together with glee at the prospect of getting rid of the problem by losing the underpasses, but homelessness is an issue we simply cannot paper over. It will just keep getting worse unless we learn to take responsibility for our own society. The sad truth is that we’re now all so entirely disconnected from one another that no one actually cares... As long as we’re not the ones in trouble.

I had lunch in Wagamama with my old mate, Matt today. It was lovely to see him but I can’t imagine how he deals with the attention he gets from his fans. We were given free puddings by someone who saw us in the restaurant and the groups sitting either side of us both asked to have their pictures taken with him. It felt a little intrusive, but it was actually a relief when they plucked up the courage to ask for a photo because they’d spent much of the meal trying to surreptitiously take pictures of him. There was a particularly tragic attempt at one point to take a “selfie” with Matt clearly in the background. At that point Matt leaned over and said, “would you like me to take a picture of the three of you?” Taking the picture gave us a temporary reprieve and them an anecdote to tweet. It was a good twenty minutes before we were hit with the “excuse me, can my friend have a picture with you?”

I tell you, if I’d have sat taking pictures of those girls as blatantly as they were taking pictures of Matt, a complaint would have been made and I’d have been thrown out of the restaurant. People get so protective of their own privacy, but forget all of their own boundaries when a famous person walks into a space.