Unemployed again, naturally...

But everything's okay. An old witch has blessed me.

This is Gilbert O’Sullivan. You can try singing this song but replace ‘alone’ with ‘unemployed’, you just have to sing it kind of fast.

I’ve gained three new subscribers this month and I have no idea why. My last newsletter was in April. I could have died in the meantime. How many more people will subscribe if I continue posting nothing? Can I call it a vow of silence? I’ve been wanting to take one of those since my piano teacher, Anna, told me that her other student, Shaneen Levy (total north star), was doing one. I was 11 and it was 2004. I still haven’t committed to the act … or did I just do it online?

That stupid introduction was only written to function as an entree to detail an odd exchange I had with a woman at the L bus stop in Liverpool Street on Tuesday. I’d been hurtling through the underground, late enroute to a friend’s escape room birthday fun times when I suddenly had five minutes to wait before the bus arrived. So, having been denied breakfast by the rush, I dashed off and bought a honey oat bar, and while eating that ducked into Pret and grabbed the other 90% of my diet: a prosciutto baguette. Et voila, I’m back at the bus stop.

Halfway through my crunchy crumbly honey love, a stout, elderly figure in a purple parka waddles through the bus crowd and plants herself on the bench in front of me. She turns, gently, and locks my eyes. Deadpan, she raises her open palm towards my oat bar, almost half gone. She wants some. I look to my oat bar for an answer. It looks at her. She looks at it. I look at them both. They both look to me.

is this too big?

Not seeing another way out, I went to hand her the other half from the packet and her facade came down with a cackle. “I’m joking,” she says, and I think it’s the best thing an audacious stranger has done to me in years, so I pass her the other half, and she accepts, because she deserves a prize.

I spent the bus journey that followed consumed in the why: is it a bit she pulls regularly? You don’t see a lot of people eating on the streets in London. How long has she been doing this? What kind of responses does she usually get? Maybe it was her first time. If she has them, do her adult children know who she is without them? Is she wicked? What else does she do when no one is looking? Why isn’t she as boring as everyone else? Who is she?

I accepted that she’s probably just a witch and that I must have slipped momentarily into another realm - that of Aesop’s ancient Greece or the Grimm brothers’ 18th century - whereby I was a walking, talking, responsive example of how to respond appropriately - I think? - to some invisible audience. That is to say: don’t mention the baguette.