Cold calling

The man sat with his back to the window painting a picture of the Dalai Lama from a photograph on his laptop screen. I stood outside the studio shop front, staring in, the eyes in the face in the portrait gazing back, slightly through and over my head to the other side of the road. The artist sat between us, insulated from the traffic and the cold by toughened glass and his concentration.

The wind zipped funnel like down the wide street, whipping my body heat away through my suit, and I thought longingly of the winter coat that I’d hung to dry last night over the Rayburn in the kitchen at the barn. The directions had suggested that the walk from London Bridge Station would take 5 minutes. Quarter of an hour in and my feet were tingling with cold numbness from the pavement through the soles of my court shoes. My fingers were a delicate shade of mottled whitish purple blue by the time I spotted building number 241.

In this part of London, the streets are not so much paved with gold as littered with flyers advertising language schools and credit card sized handouts giving details of how to make cheap phone calls home to loved ones left behind in exotically named places. Lanky male students in leather jackets and over-long jeans stand around in groups smoking, slouchingly engaging in animated conversations in languages I do not recognise.

I took shelter from the cold in a fortuitously placed Starbucks and regained feeling in my extremities over a bucket of Americano (milk, lots of sugar). The tall paper cup had a plastic lid on top with a hole in it. I’ve often seen sharp city types supping their drinks through these whilst walking briskly and with mesmerised determination as if summoned by the Morlochs from the Time Machine. I don’t trust them not to tip scalding coffee down my front; the lids are a bit dodgy too, so I took mine off and put it on the table.

The drinks in these places are supernaturally hot. It took a full 25 minutes to reach the dregs of ultra sugared coffee at the bottom, a unit of time I shall henceforth think of as a Starbuck. I haven’t worn a watch since I was 18, one consequence of which being that I’m pretty accurate at guessing. Admittedly this gets thrown out a bit when I’m in a different time zone, but at home here I’m usually there or thereabouts. This is good enough on most occasions but not when you’ve got a job interview, so I got my mobile out of my handbag for reassurance.

There had been a short young guy in a smart grey suit ahead of me in the coffee queue when I came in, and I recognised him when he returned ten minutes later because he’d ordered the same drink as me. Even from my table by the window I could hear him complaining in a whiny voice about how the assistant must have put the lid on his cup incorrectly and now it was all down his jacket. He paused for breath, and then continued saying, as if to seal the deal, that he had to give a presentation in a minute and now the coffee had ruined his suit. It’s a shame as it turned out that he hadn’t paused sooner, as the young woman towards whom he’d directed his tirade clearly hadn’t understood a word. She summoned her three colleagues over as he repeated his complaint. Finally comprehending, a statuesque blonde took the cup from his hand and replaced the plastic lid with a new one before giving it back to him. Which may or may not have been what Mr Suit expected.

In between Starbucks and number 241 stands an ornately porticoed handsomely proportioned building with white arched windows and a glossy iron set of railings. I stood looking up at it while smoking a last pre-interview cigarette. Empty, abandoned and disused, it was once a post office, the holes in the stone facade where the mail slots were now bolted over with metal sheets. It occurred to me (not for the first time) how cavalier we are sometimes with our old buildings, and I was sad to see this one closed and inaccessible to be used or enjoyed by anyone.

After the interview, I retraced my steps to the station. A young man with a knotty beard and rainbow striped jumper handed me an international calls discount card valid for countries where I know no-one. I dropped it in the rubbish bin outside a pub and went and caught my train.

I took this photo on London Bridge Station. The sign's made up of little light bulbs.