SA SMITH

The bricks are sand yellow. That is the prevailing colour of the building at least. If you were to take a moment, as few do, you’d notice that every third brick is black, or a loud brown. The windows are evenly spaced, up and across, like holes on a connect-4 frame. They are tall, presumably spanning half the height of each storey. The frames are a contrasting charcoal grey, thin as match-sticks. The panes are thin and let out little light, giving the sense of a dark, cavernous interior. The emerging impression from some distance is that the windows are not glazed at all. The headers arch across each window-top, in neat orange brick.

Watching England this summer has been markedly different from the experience, 3 years ago, in the World Cup. The World Cup of 2018 was a peak moment as a Londoner. Those rare times of perceptible unity. Packed into small sawdust-covered pubs, squinting at a TV across the room, pint resting heavily on dashed nerves. That warm summer the city came alive, revived like the 2012 Olympics. On the street, it was on everyone’s mind, and we had something to talk about. We had as a city and a country a shared dream: maybe football was coming home.

On Saturday I got my first vaccine for coronavirus, at St Thomas’. Less ordeal than outing. Something akin to the first day of a school you’ll attend for 20 minutes. When it was my turn, I sat in the green chair and answered the questions. From nowhere a scratch on the skin, and I prepared myself to get the jab. I was informed though, that the scratching sensation had been the jab, and I was ready to leave.

We rarely write about coffee here, and sometimes we do.

The Gentlemen Baristas have a few locations in the Borough area of London. Union St is a narrow back street that gets more foot-traffic than traffic-traffic. On this street there is a small builders’ yard and other anonymous buildings. Only ‘The Coffee House’ the pub next door make any imprint on the eye. It is a tall and narrow building, squeezed between its neighbours with its elbows in.

The best beach in London is hidden, like a secret garden, by murky grey water at high tide. Its sand is incongruously soft and golden when uncovered. Rotting wooden scaffold beams that seem to have been assembled from the masts of old smuggling ships cover the beach’s long tail. The structure supports a Chinese takeaway and a small block of flats that overreach the land they started on.