The Pure Life of Dreams

October 5, 2025October 5, 2025

Nah, Me, I’m a North London Boy, Mate

When I called up Karin to arrange a time to meet I sensed a reluctance on the other end of the line. I was only in the UK another two days and I too, was not sure about meeting up myself but I called her anyway.

We arranged to meet on the Saturday, the day before I was flying back to the States. I went to her place that evening, and part of me wondered whether we would have a roll around in the hay so to speak, for old times sake.

Karin’s flat in Elephant and Castle was on the second floor of a tenement building. It was a student flat. A few flatmates were hanging there when I arrived. Karin and I stood in a grubby galley kitchen with unwashed plates, pots and pans in the sink and more dirty plates piled up on a small table by the wall.

‘What do you think?’ asked Karin.

She held up a photo of herself wearing a red beret. The beret was turned around so that the peak jutted out over her forehead instead of to the side. In the photo she was wearing a thin pencil mustache.

‘Looks good,’ I lied.

Women with pretend mustaches always disturbed me. ‘But I’m not sure about the beret,’ I added.

A tall man with long brown unkempt hair came into the kitchen and pressed up against her.

‘I told you I was going out, with someone tonight. An old friend,’ Karin said to him.

She sucked on a cigarette and nodded towards me. I felt that our meeting was not going the way I expected. Maybe it was not always a good idea to catch up with old friends.

We walked over to the common room.

A group of greasy students were lounging about in the room. They had spread themselves across the furniture. Karin found a spot to one side while I sat next to one of the students. A weak light came in through the net curtains which covered the windows. Another student sat on the chair back of the armchair in front of the window.

Karin pulled out a cigarette from a soft pack of Marlboro Reds and rested it on her knee. I was about to ask her if I could bum one of them when she held up a small brass bowl from the table in front of her and lit the bottom of it with a flame from her lighter. The flame licked the base of the bowl.

She handed the brass bowl to the student next to me and stuck her cigarette into a long thin cigarette holder. The cigarette holder looked antique. It was also brass.

The student next to me was talking about how great Elephant and Castle was. To switch the focus of the room back to Karin I thought to interrupt him to ask her for a drag from the cigarette holder. But then I thought better of it.

In a thick London accent I blurted out, ‘Nah, me, I’m a north London boy. South London, Elephant is no good. You can’t even get a tube around much of South London, mate.’

At that, the student next to me laughed, before sinking back into the cushions of the couch.

Photo AI generated by Stockcake, and cropped.

September 14, 2025September 15, 2025

A Party for High School Girls and Boys, a Bath and a Boat

The party for high school girls and boys was up some stairs in a hall on the island but when we arrived there we were already late; somebody had hung a wooden sign from the lintel ‘No Boys’ with an ‘X’ underneath. Presumably girls were still allowed and they were trying to stick to a quota.

August 22, 2025August 22, 2025

French Trilogy: A Boy Called Paris

The Elephant and Castle flat was an unusual place.

It was situated in the middle of the Rockhart Estate and was one of many flats that were subsidized to students of Guy’s Hospital in an effort to improve the standards—the estate itself having featured on the BBC as the center for crackheads and dope dealers the previous year.

July 4, 2024July 8, 2024

The Intoxication of the Woman with Silver Hair

I was hosting a party and it was getting late. I stood in the kitchen, a long galley place with muted brown oak panelling but even though many people crowded around me I wanted to retire to my bed.

From one end of the kitchen into the bedroom I slipped out, and I went over to my pullout bed. Only a crack of light shone from the bedroom door back through to the kitchen.

May 25, 2023July 26, 2025

Getting to the Party on Time (via the Angels)

We are going to a party at Siobhan’s friend’s apartment on the south side of the Embankment and are taking the train. So we get on at the Angel and take the lift, an old wooden box, down into the Underground.

The platforms we walk through are dark and grimy, brown muddied walls and hidden tunnels, and the service is running slow.

We wait on Platform 2 of the Central line, it seems like for an age, before a train finally arrives, but when it comes to a stop it is already full, people crushed together, all the way up to the ceiling.

The bodies are pressed flat against the glass and there is no way we are getting on. We will wait for the next one.

The next train is a flat bed, cargo only, with a thick plain white rectangular box which covers the deck. It speeds through the tunnel, and we continue to wait.

And the next train will be a passenger train but it will be a long time coming. We wait in anticipation but by the time it arrives the train is ill-lit from the inside and it speeds through the tunnel and disappears the other side without stopping.

It seems we’ll never get there.

“We’ll take the Circle or the District line,” I suggest. Only you have to exit the station and cross the road to the other side of the roundabout to get to the platform.

So we leave, ascending once more with the lift and cross over to the entrance of the Circle and District.

“We can take either line,” I say as we enter down into a dark corridor, intersecting rail line tracks to our left, cavernous walls dark and dripping with sweat. We have to hurry as the District line carriages clank across the lines and past us, towards their stop.

But when we arrive at the platform the problem is the same; though at the start, there were only a few passengers waiting, the crowd begins to pile up. People in dark clothing, faces barely discernible.

“We are meeting at The Kestrel,” says Siobhan. She means Reed’s place.

“But that is nowhere near the Embankment,” I say. “That is in Hammersmith.” I pull out a piece of paper to work out the directions, but it is too small to write on.

“I need something bigger,” and I turn back to her. “Have you got something?”

But Siobhan is distracted, she doesn’t reply and I have to repeat it. And only then does she pull out a larger piece of paper, the size of my hand, that I can use.

“We should go back to the Central line,” I continue. I am getting frustrated that we wasted all this time waiting for the wrong train.

We are exiting the station, onto the road that leads away from both stations, when I suggest we can take an Uber. The greying light of dusk is in the distance.

“Why didn’t you suggest that in the first place?” she says, spitting the words at me, but it was her who got us lost in the first place.

“I’m not going,” I respond, “I’ve had it!”

And I walk away, to the right of me a chain link fence, a construction site behind the fence, both stations further behind me.

“I’m not going,” I reiterate. I walk slowly.

And she follows me, she too is going the wrong way.

But this is it. Where we will really part.

I circle even slower back round the roundabout, time and fear crawls, me slightly ahead of her, until we are back on the Angel side.

I am practically at a stop when Siobhan comes up alongside, to my left. She has thick pale blonde hair and a slightly pudgy face, thick lips like Becky Farmer, unvarnished, and she is attractive at that very moment; it is eating me up.

“I want to fly around naked,” she says and she smiles.

We cannot do it. Part. I don’t want to.

“Will you do that for me?” I ask her. And then I kiss her full on the lips.

Photo via Wallpaper Flare