Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty

Yesterday didn’t go anywhere near According to Plan. My adventures with the filthy bitch I call London went a little something like this:

I was all set for an interview in the early afternoon – one that, despite my financial travails, I was reluctant to attend, primarily because it would involve a daily round-trip commute of between 5 to 6 hours. But, I’m in no position to turn down the prospect of cold, hard green, so I got up early to get ready for the trek to Guildford.

After hours of travel, my journey stalled at Waterloo. Someone had decided to embark on a Train-Assisted Suicide, eviscerating themselves on the front of a speeding train. I waited for almost 90 minutes, but the departure boards weren’t working in my favour, so my journey abruptly terminated itself, and I had to cancel the interview.

Well, there’s no point in wasting a perfectly good day in the Big City, all gangster lean in my fly suit, so I ambled over to the South Bank. It was a beautiful day, and the big concrete monster on the Thames was heaving with action. The idiosyncratic and ill-considered architecture of the South Bank makes it one of the best places in the country for skateboarding, and the skatekids were out in full force, flying up and down the concrete, adding to their growing collections of grazes and bruises, in front of a beautiful wall of pretty sweet graffiti tags. The second-hand bookstalls were crowded with bargain hunters and tourists, riffling through the musty tomes looking for Words on the Cheap. I grabbed a spot outside the NFT bar (now known as the Film Café, but I don’t think I’ll ever call it that), and nursed an ice-cold beer while I plotted out the rest of the day. I broke up the day with a leisurely walk over to Charing Cross Road to snag myself some cheap books or CDs. But it was back to the South Bank for the evening.

I scoured the film listings to find something I wanted to watch, but the batch of new releases was painfully uninspiring, so I decided to kick it a little bit old-school, and went for His Kind of Woman at the NFT, a suitably twisted offering from the time when Howard Hughes had his hands on RKO, a Robert Mitchum – Jane Russell confection, from a time when men had glass jaws, women were dames, and Vincent Price was the comic relief. A perfect ending for a luxuriously lazy Summer day.

But now I have to get the hell of this computer and get ready to make moves to Alperton for another interview. This could be the one...