I was just contemplating a small white Americano (please) as I approached the office this morning. My eye chanced on the street furniture illustrated above, and I thought it would match nicely the excerpt below – I took a moment to choose the angle.
As I returned my mobile to my pocket, a man swathed in high vis clothing and a crash helmet hurried across High Holborn, calling:
“Hello? You just photographed that (mumble)?”
I glanced at him and saw various numbers and bits of plastic which may or may not have identified him, so just kept walking, as one does these days.
I was standing at the counter ordering my coffee, when Crash Helmet walked past the queue to take a photograph of me – for what purpose, I can not imagine…
From: Bohemia in London (1907), by Arthur Ransome:
“And then there was the Tom and Jerry time, when young bloods for sport came down at night to Temple Bar to overturn the boxes of the watchmen and startle their rheumatic occupants; when Reynolds would leave his insurance office to go to Jack Randall’s in Chancery Lane to watch the sparring; when Pierce Egan, the first and greatest of sporting writers, would slip along the Strand from Soho for the same splendid purpose.”
Julia Upton 