I had a lively and fun gig tonight, where the second row consisted of a father sitting next to his pretty 21 year old twin daughters. I wonder if you can imagine what lines of comedy I explored. A couple of times the father took off his glasses to wipe tears from his eyes - I hope with laughter at the inappropriate comments I was making, but who knows. I did point out that if you added their ages together than made them older than me, so the things I was suggesting were not inappropriate after all. Ah, I love my job.
I headed home alone, somehow having failed to seduce the twins with my depraved, dirty old man act. I was back in one of my observant post gig moods, spotting the fragments of the stories of other people's lives. Half way down the Pentonville Road a young man was sitting alone on a wall eating a take-away container of chinese food. It was near to midnight and from his slumped demeanour I presumed he had been out on the pull, but had failed and the noodles were his recompense. It was a lonely sight.
Further up the road a motorcycle had pulled on the pavement outside a building and a chubby girl was waiting for the rider to give her a pizza. She was holding out her money and had no shoes on, her bare feet on the cold damp slabs, standing on tip-toe to try to keep off the cold, but clearly desperately anticipating the late dinner that was coming to her. I don't know exactly where she lived, the parade seemed to be shops and offices, but maybe there was a college or flats set off from the road behind her. It made me laugh that she had been so desperate for pizza that she had not even had time to put her shoes on. But who knows what the true story may have been?
I got down to the tube station, just as a train was pulling away. I got an hilarious and telling view of my the mood of my fellow midnight commuters. A parade of the morose, punctuated with the lust. It was like some elaborate slideshow as each window passed, a different face and a mood captured. A middle aged black woman snoozing off, a young asian man in a tie, with his head in his hands, a bleary-eyed drunk making a hopeless effort to read a free paper, a couple snogging. But mainly it was pictures of people alone, looking thoughtful or unhappy or tired. Like the man eating noodles on a wall. All the lonely people, I don't know where they all come from, though in this case I know where they were heading. In the direction of Uxbridge.
OK, I am going to do the 5 year draw on Friday now, because some of you have not sent in your addresses. And I don't want to award prizes to people that I then can't send them to. If you have not sent me your address then you will not be eligible for a prize. Don't think that because you've sent me your address in the past that I still have it, cos I don't. You must have sent your postal address to me since you donated to Herring1967@googlemail.com
You have til Friday.
I promise to do the draw on Friday, though it's an organisational nightmare, but this means you still have a couple of days to donate if you wish. I will try to get the prizes out before Christmas, but can't guarantee this.
