Sitting When the Evening Comes

I’m going to let you into a secret: I am thirty years old and I live in a bedsit.

This is something that I’m not only ever so slightly ashamed of, but also tends to piss me off a little, not least because I used to live in a house and before that a maisonette and before that a flat. Those were proper places to live, but somehow I seem to have dropped down to the bottom of the pile.

The landlord calls my bedsit a studio-flat, but that’s just a reason to hike the rent up.

I think, technically, the definition of a bedsit is that either the kitchen or the bathroom is shared, that they exist outside your private area. Everything here is self-contained; I have my own kitchen, my own bathroom. The smell of cooking and its ultimate destination all linger around my pillow.

But it’s still a bedsit.

After all, I spend quite a bit of time sitting on the bed.

Anyway, this is also the first place I’ve ever lived without a garden or any sort of communal outside space. In the winter this wasn’t a problem but given that my tiny bedsit is also rather stuffy it’s been incredibly annoyingly sweaty all summer.

Yes, Hilly Fields and Telegraph Hill are nearby. I have plenty of green space options, but it isn’t quite the same. I can’t take a cup of tea to Hilly Fields.
If I need the toilet, I have to come home. If I take work with me I need to be certain I’ve remembered everything from spare pens to the London A-Z. Going out in the sun requires a degree of forward planning I currently seem incapable of.

So, I’ve started to take myself out the front of the building and sit on the wall by the pavement. I go out for ten-fifteen minutes at a time, breaks from working in the sweat pit. I sit and watch Brockley go past. Sometimes I take a bit of the paper or a book and even if it’s late the light from the streetlamp means I can read. Sometimes, I’ll take a glass of wine or something similar with me. I nod at the neighbours and they look at me slightly strangely, as though unsure whether they’re allowed to find me amusing.

The road I live on is opposite the station and as such sees a lot of passing commuters. I like watching the variances in people’s manners depending on the time of night, the differences between those who are still fresh, those who are exhausted to the point of depression and those who are simply drunk to the point of bewilderment.

But I’m upset. There’s a slightly odd trend amongst some people to cross the road.
They look up the hill and see me perched on the wall reading the Observer with a glass of pinot grigo and they cross the road and then return to my side of the street further on up, where they think I can’t still see them on the brow of the hill.

They appear to be, in short, wary of what I might do to them,

This is a shame, but I guess there’s no tradition in Britain of observing the world outside your front door. In America, the image of sitting out on the front porch perhaps supping a Bud or chewing tobacco or perhaps inching a palely chequered arm around the teenage sweetheart daydream with a can of Dr Pepper close by, is a classic. In Italy there’s the tradition of the evening stroll around the town centre where the masses descend late at night just before going to bed to shout excitedly to each other whilst surreptitiously eyeing up their neighbour’s wife. Instead, life here is secreted away behind closed doors or behind the six foot high rose bushes encircling the back garden.

Well, perhaps I do strike a rather odd figure, perched atop the low wall, my bare feet dangling just about the fag butt strewn pavement, empty dirty chicken boxes fading in the sunlight. But, still, I mean really – what do they think I’m going to do to them? Do they expect me to leap up and threaten them with my half empty wine glass? (Don’t they know I’ve only two left unbroken.) Or do they think I’ll clamber atop the pillar at the end and preach the moderate left wing badly disguised middle class mandates of the Guardian until they promise to do more recycling?

I don’t, seriously, look scary, do I?

Honestly, I’m a gentle cutie pie, when you get to know me.

Besides, any of the above would be far too easy.