Tag: something i saw

Red bus

My bus home was going thankfully quick at the tail end of peak hour. Then luck ran out — we hit a traffic plug five minutes from home. Another red double decker bus (with the same route number as my bus, in fact) had stopped diagonally across the road and was choking traffic.

I went back to my newspaper but was then disturbed by passengers leaning over me to look out my window. I looked up at them, then followed their eyes out the window too. There, lying in the middle of the road was a cyclist and a bike. His fluorescent yellow jacket was splattered with blood.

As we inched past the unmoving man and the cops, I saw that there were still people on the immobile double decker. They, too, were gaping out their windows onto the road.

Going up

When I arrived at work this morning, there was something wrong about the three lifts that take people up and down our seven-storey building.

‘You’ll have to wait a while if you want the lift,’ the concierge said. ‘We’ve called the maintenance staff. They should be on their way to fix it.’

Above the center lift, the arrow was flashing and the number 19 popped up.

‘What’s floor 19?’ the man next to me exclaimed.

‘Well, they were doing a lot of building last night,’ said the concierge.

Museum, grazing and Fame

Damjan and I went to the British Museum on Saturday and also saw the musical Fame.

Damjan liked these teacups. No, we are not at Ikea — these are procelain cups from China, made hundreds of years ago!

Our London eating style is called ‘grazing’. When we see something that looks tasty, we buy a bit and eat it. Here I am at Leicester Square (‘Lester‘) eating a pork bun from nearby Chinatown.


Fame was interesting enough. It had no plot, just some shallow characterisations of about eight students going through four years of high school at the New York School of Performing Arts. Once I let go of all expectations of a plot line, I enjoyed it more. The dancing was goodish, although not of the standard you should expect from a West End production. Maybe this is what you get from performers who are musical theatre generalists, rather than dance specialists.

There were three girls in front of us who were too enthusiastic with the cheering and the dancing and the clapping. I think they knew one of the performers.

A quiet evening walk

This evening, I went for a walk through Midsummer Common. I walked through the warm summer air and light breeze, and felt peaceful and comfortable. The old Victorian buildings seemed hyperreal against the blue sky. The cloud streaks were white when I left home and soon, were tinged with the orange of sunset. I took a photo of all this with my mind.

Midsummer Common is dotted with oak trees. There is an especially expansive one near the river. As I walked towards it on the path to the river, something shimmered at me from its branches. I didn’t have my glasses on so for the half minute it took for me to get near it, it was a shimmering, shiny red globe. Finally, when I was five metres away, I saw that someone had hung a red tinsel wreath from a slim looping branch.

It looked so pretty.

I took another mental photo.

Then it was time to go home.

A worthy cause

You can find the same Big Issue seller outside Sainsbury’s in town almost every day. He keeps up a stream of drawling chatter, spruiking to a constant flow of shoppers who walk by without making eye contact. ‘Big Issue, someone, anyone, buy your Big Issue here, only thirty to go, help out your fellow man, I’ve got thirty more copies then I can go home…’

With his experience, he could work as a spruiker for any retail store.

One weekend, Damjan and I were had popped into Sainsbury’s for fruit. It was getting late and the Big Issue seller’s monologue was still going: ‘Only six more copies, buy your Big Issue, I need money to get drunk, I wish I didn’t but it’s true, buy your Big Issue, six copies to go…’

Worker’s rights


See Mike’s Bikes in this photo? I was walking past the store on Wednesday at about 3 PM in the afternoon. Strangely, it was dark and quiet. When I reached the front door, the CLOSED sign was up. Very unusual.

A piece of white lined paper taped to the door explained it all. In black marker scrawl, the note said:

“Haven’t been paid on time AGAIN. I’m going home. 1 PM.”

The New Art of War

It was 9 PM when Toria came into the lobby. The girls had assembled to discuss our evening plans. ‘Hi girls,’ Toria greeted us. ‘You know, the boys are downstairs in the pool. In the jacuzzi, in fact. It looks very funny.’

‘Really?’ I laughed. ‘Anyone got a camera? We should take a photo.’

Toria handed me her compact camera and we trooped downstairs to ogle.

We found Ian C, Abdel, Chris, Eskandar, Yap, Owen and Joe in a ring at the perimeter of the round spa. Duane was smack bang in the middle, like the hub of the strange bubbling wheel of engineering man-flesh.

I giggled like a schoolgirl and snapped two photos.

While Toria and I were loitering at the door to pool, Kiki rushed in.

‘D5 to E7,’ she called.

Duane rose a little out of the spa. He considered her announcement briefly, then said, ‘H8 to E8.’

‘H8 to E8,’ Kiki repeated. She rushed back out. Toria and I followed her as she mumbled ‘H8 to E8’ all the way to the bar, where Arun and Markus were waiting in front of the chess board.

‘H8 to E8,’ Kiki told them.

‘Ah! Told you he’d do that!’ Arun exclaimed, as he shifted the piece.

‘Tell Duane F4 to G5,’ Markus said to Kiki.

She was about to run off when Arun said, ‘Hold on! Let’s think about this…’

I shook my head in amazement. I knew Duane was the National Jamaican Chess Champion and had already crushed the best chess players in Cambridge, Oxford and London. But playing chess through Kiki-graph while lounging in a jacuzzi? That is truly boggling.

New kid on the block

Near my house, there are two hairdressing salons. They look very similar, with the same minimalist white and silver decor, fluorescent bottles of hair product in the window, skinny and stylish female hair artists waiting to do your bidding.

The difference, though, is that one salon is often full, with customers content to wait in line. The other one is almost always empty. The empty one only opened a month or two after I arrived in Cambridge in September.

Whenever I walk by the new salon, I feel sorry for it. They don’t seem to have done anything wrong (after all, they are copying a successful recipe). Will it survive? Will it fail? I will monitor the situation and let you know.