Park Life

Walking along Walworth Road I feel like a night walker stuck in the wrong time frame. The fresh morning air engulfs me, and I feel clear headed though my eyes are still adjusting to the light. The street is a ghost town, only the emaciated and scruffy old men furnished with their Special Brew roam in these early hours of Sunday morning, well, those and the ubiquitous morning runners, who litter the usually crowded pavements.

I walk along leisurely, enjoying the cool morning air and plan to walk to the park and sit by the lake, feed the ducks, what a romantic image. As I pass the mass of closed consumerism, very few of the insidious neon signs still aglow, I round the corner near the park and stumble across Mary's Cafe. I often pass the place on the bus, and it had been on my list of places to go for a while so I figure there's nothing to lose by venturing in; I abandon my park plans.



Inside the walls are covered in blue and yellow vertically striped wallpaper, and tables in various primary colours are dotted around, adorned with black wooden chairs which remind me of a school room. An old woman stares at me listlessly as I walk across the tiled floor to the counter, where a man with a grey moustache jovially greets me and says "Thanks, sweedie", as he takes the £3.80 I proffer for my breakfast special number one, which I read fresh off the chalk board.

Taking my cup of tea in the pleasingly rounded canary yellow mug, I retreat to a pastel yellow table to the middle left of the room, next to a wall. The sound of a can opening pierces the air as the woman wearing gold hoop earrings adjacent to me opens her tin of ginger beer as she waits for her black pudding. Two old men sit by the window in front of the devoid 'Merry Christmas' sign still lingering from years earlier; their faces decorated with glasses and wrinkles; they mirror each other taking gulps of the two cups of tea in front of them. One gets out his TV guide and eagerly reads out the program for later on in the evening, the other leans forward to listen whilst outside a red double decker bus is visible, most of its passengers in their Sunday best.



I loop the handle of my cup and drag the tea towards me, before clumsily measuring out two heaped tablespoons of sugar, which I pour from the sugar shaker nestling on the table amongst the other paint palette of condiments. Stirring in the sugar slowly and deliberately with my thumb and index finger steering the spoon I suddenly feel the urge to smoke a cigarette, which is impossible seeing as a) I have no cigarettes and b) smoking's not allowed here.

I unfold my newspaper onto the table and start to read it in vain, soon realising props here are not necessary, and I follow the old womans lead and unashamedly drink in the scene around me. The gaffer wanders from table to table, cracking jokes and making general banter with the regulars and I wonder if this is what I'll be like in sixty years time, devoid of any real pressing matters (perhaps), time stretched before me to peruse at my leisure. I think of my Gran, and how she'd have been at home in a place like this, if she was still around I would've brought her here.

My breakfast arrives and I tuck into the bacon egg beans tomatoes and sausage I have been anticipating. The old men at the window carry on with their conversation, the old women near the back of the cafe carry on theirs with the gaff. The radio starts to play and I feel like I could be in another era...until I turn my head to one side and am greeted with the panoramic widescreen tv screaming the message "Should human eggs be for sale?".

Reality zones back in and I realise I have been sitting in my spot for nearly an hour. I make a resolve to come to the cafe every sunday morning, and muse that maybe old lonely people don't have it so bad afterall. Then again, what do I know, I'm just a phoney regular at least twenty years too young.