In the short while in which I was out – in fact in the short while in which I was out and in the area surrounding Finsbury Park station – I witnessed a small collection of oddities all occur in sequence. Its not like this is irregular for the area. Regular blogees will know that I often see denizens of the mad roaming the North London streets in a daytime on an almost weekly occurrence, but sometimes, despite knowing this, it still catches me out. I always try and see if there is some sort of explanation. The judgemental and snobbish side to me ponders on the notion that people who are around during the day are either loony creative types like myself, unemployed people, elderly people or people who have a reason as to why they can’t work. This provides an eclectic mix of public clashing into each other around the ever popular hub that is the tube station and no doubt, madness may prevail and partially sighted bent over old lady crashes head first into angry disillusioned youth while some twat tries to do an oil painting of the fracas. Then again I also wonder if there are just some days where something is in the air that means there is a tendency to be more barmy then usual.
I mean the incidents I saw today weren’t the only odd thing I’ve witness so far. Whilst getting my haircut, the hairdresser (who has cut my hair for sometime due to a) my loyalty to such things and b) the fact she is quite good and doesn’t just insist on making me look like a fat kid in the army like some barbers, or charging me £25 to look like a Shoreditch twat/girl/loser) said to me today that sometimes she can ‘feel people’s hair’. This was her excuse for not cutting it any shorter today as she knew she shouldn’t. I sat quietly as she then did her usual razor blade cutting technique, wondering just how I ended up putting my life in the hands of someone who wields a sharp object by my face and talks to a filamentous biomaterial. Yes I looked that term up. No, I’m not that clever. The conversation, rather than delve into the usual diatribe of holidays and work before I resort to staring at my own face for 40 mins and find new and exciting ways to loathe it – today it was the constant habit of speaking mostly out of the right side of my face) entered new realms of her starting a psychic hair salon, and then for some reasons into her hatred of charities and finally the political situation in Cuba which she put down to Fidel’s awful beard. Luckily I’m pleased with the hair cut though I am a tad scared she’s shaved incantations into the back of my neck with me knowing.
Then following that hair raising experience – arf – on my walk back home an elderly man roared at me like a lion and I then witnessed a woman running for the bus, before realising halfway down the street that she had left behind her pram with her two children in it. Now, I’m not even going to begin to try and explain either of these. Quite why the old man made a noise like a lion, I don’t know. Feral instinct? Fear I was trying to claim his territory? Wanting to point out he’s the mane man – arf again, I’m on a roll. Downhill – or perhaps he just thinks he’s a lion? It wasn’t a very scary roar, but a roar it was. I looked at him quizzically and then he nearly fell over his own feet as he ambled past me down the road. Possibily to hunt gazelle. And the woman? Er, well. I’m not sure how you just forget about two kids. I mean, what excuse was she going to provide when she got home and someone asks where her children are? How badly did she need to get on that bus? Of course, they could not be her kids at all and she could have been doubling back realising she could steal someone else’s. Either way, she’s clearly a bad person.
I love that bit of Taxi Driver where Robert De Niro’s character harps on about how ‘All the animals come out at night’. I would like to remake that film but set in Finsbury Park on a Tuesday afternoon. Angry cabbie’s are run of the mill round here. Combine that with his hairdresser probably refusing to give him a mohican on account of the hair’s feelings, and any further rage would be quelled with confusion when a man roars at him, then concern as he sees random people leaving babies everywhere.
