MEZZA EXPRESS

This is the taste of despair. You came for a camera - all this way for a camera - and you didn't even find it. They sold it before you arrived. You are spit back onto the street, and as the thick door of the camera shop slams behind you, it starts to rain. You are the image of desperation. You are a fool. Why did you come here? Why did you think that things would work out? You walk the garish streets, rain on your nose, rain on your glasses, rain down the back of your neck. The cars kick puddles onto your boots. You try to find shelter, but there is none, and so you wander. You walk along the river, watch the rain pat down the rippling eddies, glance into back gardens where patio furniture sits, empty, dripping. and into the windows of home offices, where the backs of computer monitors obscure all but the tops of heads and typing fingers. Your trousers are soaked, and you can barely see through your glasses, and you find yourself, all of the sudden, grabbing the handle of a door, and pulling, and then you are inside, and you wipe your eyes and ask for a falafel wrap with halloumi.

Despair! You are hungry, concavely, but the train is sooner, and you run off, falafel in hand, towards the station. On the train, you stand in the door, too self-conscious to eat your wrap. You'll have it when you get to Waterloo, you think, but half an hour later you are off the train, running down to the Northern Line, and then you are home, and your wrap is hours old, and why on Earth haven't you eaten it yet? And you take off your wet trousers and hang them over your bed frame and, shivering in cold and hollow hunger, you sit down and eat your falafel. This is the taste of salvation. Five stars.