13 April - Camden & 50's

We’re in a pub in Camden to meet with some old friends who’ve just emigrated to Portugal and are having one group goodbye. It’s a pub I know I went to a couple of decades ago and its’ since been enlarged and refitted, in fact it’s so huge with the extensive outdoor area as to resemble an adventure playground and has a different feel according to the area you choose to occupy. But what’s extraordinary is the amount of kids in it, very distinctively Camden rather than west London ones. The friends I’m with are 50+ and visibly so, people from a distant Adam & the Ants period, before he was Adam in fact. The combined weight of their gut is sizeable. Actually one or two are trim, but on the whole the dated haircuts and clothes make them look like the old bunch they are. They used to come here in their school days and am sure played snooker (table no longer exist) and did not pay £8 for a burger or indeed if wine was sold here then.

I warn Toph about the perils of 3 pints a night for most nights of the week but there’s no need to do so. He hates guts as much as I do and in fact is very uncharitable about a 30 something friend of the 50 year olds. He thinks she looks like a troll. I feel better now that I know my boy will not be the one to accuse me of being a body fascist. At least my old friends here have up to the minute spec frames. I especially hate it when people don’t update their glasses. I know it’s expensive but they sit on your face, so please change them? And do sort out your teeth? I know even Jeremy Irons clings on to his greeny/grey ones, but … why???? No one said you have to go Tom Cruise’s dazzling shade of white but, just make them look clean?