Today I travelled by my usual routes to Norman’s and to Carol’s in London. After Jackie delivered me to New Milton Station I noticed this warning of the possible consequences of climbing into the waste container outside the ticket office:
Whilst on the run in the 1994 film ‘Guet-apens (The Getaway)’ which I watched in Sigoules a couple of years ago, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger did just that. They were tipped into a garbage truck and clambered to the back as they watched the crusher squashing everything in its path as it moved towards them. This had all the tension of Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. It was too early in the thriller for the desperate pair to meet their end there, so, as if on a helter-skelter, when the vehicle dumped its load, they careered into the rusting and rotting heap of municipal refuse before continuing on their way.
On the train to Waterloo, joining in a conversation about the changes in house prices since the 1960s, I enjoyed the company of two women who turned out to be retired nurses trained at the old Charing Cross Hospital in the late1950s. This building, they told me, is now a police station. They, who were travelling to an annual reunion with their contemporaries, knew my old Westminster patch well. This broadened our discussion somewhat.
For lunch, Norman provided Spanish paella, green beans from I don’t know where, German apple strudel, English custard, and a fine bottle of Italian nebbiola 2010.
On the seat beside me on the Metropolitan Line train from Preston Road lay someone’s discarded fish and chip wrappers. An Asian boy, plugged into a mobile device, removed them, placed them on the floor, sat down, and proceeded to finish his own chicken and chips taken from a cardboard container that, bones and all, he left behind on his departure. There was once an advertisement in the carriages advising diners that this practice was unpleasant for both the staff and other passengers. Perhaps London Underground Limited have now given up.
Parked alongside Westminster Underground station, surrounded by passers by, many using mobile phones, one of the cycling rickshaw men who are often waiting there for customers consumed a snack and put his feet up.
Finally, the woman opposite me in the train home from Waterloo tucked into a Pret a Manger salad.
Food To Go
