10 November – Becky Goes to Soho

There are some nights more nighty than others, when the darkness has a bit of nutmeg in it and works its tingly through abutting molecules.  On nights like these you dance the macabre with sad clowns on unicycles and get trapped within Pan bottles until rattled and released by a supporting character from a Tom Waits song.  These are the After Hours nights, even if they commence when the moon has just begun her assent and the bars are still crowded with workers sneaking in a nip before catching the train to their suburban enclaves.  We had one such eve last Thursday in Soho.  Nick, Isabelle and I were en route to enjoy a very civilized evening of dinner and a gallery opening and auction.  As the taxi crawled through streets freshly lit with manta-ray lights, my magpie eye spied the loveliest of windows ever I have seen.  Ooh – I cried.  Please may we, may we!  So we stopped the cab and leapt out and entered the happiest place in all the world – Fortnum Mason.  I felt as if we’d landed in an opulent version of The Nutcracker party scene.  The delights too delightful, the marvels too marvelous and everything whetted all possible senses and created sixes and sevens to handle the supernumerary pleasures.  We bought fudge and boiled sweets and I was led – not unfirmly – past the wedding cakes and back into the night.

We looked for a restaurant, and the third we entered was very much the charm.   It was a small, well appointed tapas place, with an attentive staff and the best mushrooms I have ever eaten.  Even the dormant prawns looked happy to be offered up as a sacrifice to sustenance and base-laying. 

After dinner we went to the gallery opening.  It was a photography exhibition of rock and folk icons.  We each found the one we would want, if we were the sort of people who could actually grocery shop at F&M – Nick’s was a phenomenal iconic late 70s shot of Debbie Harry, Isa wanted Bob Dylan contact sheets and my heart was stolen by one of the aforementioned troubadour, Mr. Waits.

We left the gallery and met the first of many new friends this evening*.  He was a be-dreaded fellow with a lilting Caribbean accent, with which he sang a litany of the current London street names for all the drugs within the rainbow.  Nick seemed a bit concerned that I, being a foreigner, would not understand what the man was proffering.   I did though, as drug lingo may as well be Esperanto.  I laughed and replied, no but thank you and after some pleasantries we chatted about Obama winning the election, while Nick and Isa stared on in uneasy confusion.  We parted from “Charlie”** and moved to a pub down the lane.  Nick went for wine and Isa and I found a table upstairs.  I said something to Isa, and was approached by a man claiming to like my accent, New York and America (the Obama effect is fast and effective).  We chatted a bit, and then as they were leaving, his friend came over and also chatted with us.  He was apologetic, in the way of so many English men, but rather cute, and we would have had no issue with him joining us and sorrying for the rest of the evening.

Nick came back up.  Sorry went down, and I was regaled by Isa and Nick’s tales of adventure and survival.  I find it amazing that both have made into their 20s.  They have some serious luck on their side – though Luck does test its benefactors along the way.  Nick was attacked by one of seven potential baby-daddies of a pregnant shark he had been forced to photograph in Fiji.  Isa’s dad seemed to be running covert experiments on the heat-tolerance of infants, and both of them have a trove of tales that would dazzle even Jim Hawkins, Huck and Mowgli.

We were lied to by a rose-bearing man, chatted up by the denizens settled in across the way, and I learned that no matter what the bartender says – the men’s loo is not unisex just because it is unoccupied.  It is still decidedly male and a bit nasty.

A taxi took us each to our homes, and my new goal is to have “Nick’s House” added to The Knowledge^.  That night I dreamed sweetly of a London infused with the British versions of a new-yorkian population, and reaffirmed that this is exactly where I wish to be. 

*In New York it wouldn’t have been so extraordinary, but here people just do not come up and speak with strangers.  I am convinced that people meet all their lifelong friends and most mates at University and then decide they’ve reached their friend quota.  You may be lucky and befriend your colleagues – but pretty much everyone important in their lives will have been spotted and tagged while they are between the ages of 18 – 22.

**Yes, I know that was not his name, but his product – but it’s all I’ve got.

^What taxi drivers must know before they can become black-cab drivers.  It involves absolutely everything that is  mapped in London.  Everything.