So many years in London and somehow I’ve never been to Mercato Metropolitano in Elephant and Castle. There was a birthday party there tonight, and we had to use What Three Words to find it as the place is VAST. It puts me in mind of the huge bar and food parks they have in South America and some of the USA. Craft beer stalls vying with enchilada bars and pizza ovens. Wooden tables shared between all the concessions. Sort of outside but with covered areas.
It’s not warm. It feels like autumn. Where is summer? Still we were outside in jackets and drinking German lager by the bucket. Old friends and new. Another birthday, this time Ffion with whom I’m doing most of the Globe after dinner type shenanigans. She was at Bristol Old Vic around the time I was at Guildhall and has run along similar lines. It’s lovely and easy working with her. I’m happy to celebrate another year of life.
We can do this again now at last. I still really feel the repercussions of all that fear when we felt guilty about touching each other and people “hilariously” offered elbows. We’re out the other side of it and we can go and have drunken foolery in places like that huge food and booze hall. The place was rammerjammered, not just with our partygoers – the good people of London having a noisy Saturday and for a change I was swept up in it all.
Maybe I left earlier than I normally would have. I used to like to try to be the last man standing but my stamina and my bank balance can’t rise to that anymore. So I went before I had to and I’m kinda glad of it as I’m writing to you clean and bathed having had a good long (drunken) conversation with my brother who finally showed up just before I left.
Also the skies have just opened outside my flat. It’s the sort of weather nobody wants to be caught in, especially if like me you never carry an umbrella because of the certainty that you will leave it somewhere.
A gorgeous night and I’ll sleep well and long and call it a Sunday lie in for all that weekends actually mean to me. Maybe some culture tomorrow… I’ve got a shot at catching up with my brother. He’s lived in Thailand for years so I rarely get to see him.
AlBarclay 