In the Mood
There are thirteen people in the basement of Leicester Square’s late-night noodle bar. It could fit one queen-sized bed. The staircase from the street-level food counter has been tacked into a party wall, leaving a one-up one-down as if we have sidestepped the real restaurant and walked, mouths open at the ready, into a dumbwaiter. There are two plates of garlic meat and a central can of Sprite on the table between us. The walls are yellow with burgundy railings and skirting boards. If these details were green, or orange, it may not have been so much of a mood.
The next morning it is wet in Hampstead. We sit in a café with dark wood panels and background music that sounds like red gingham. There are two cappuccinos and there’s bacon, thick-cut in an expensive way, on the table between us. With the twinned coffees there, we get to talking about the Larry David episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
“My wife gets angry with me that I don’t order coffee with her anymore Jerry! Can you believe that? I mean I’ll come with you and get some tea. I’ve got a mug of something hot and you do too! But she’d rather not go at all.” Jerry looks back at Larry over the rim of his drip coffee. “I think she’s got a point. When you go for coffee you go for coffee. That’s the mood.”
In the afternoon I meet a school friend in Clapham. We haven’t seen each other since August but he skips hello and nods a ‘Yes’ at my Lambretta jacket. Then we day drink 6 pints of Stella in the carpeted section of the London and Southwestern Wetherspoons which is fully brown, except for the signature blue and white china. We do not buy rounds. My very intimidatingly built friend has a lemonade vape. If this were a first meeting and it wasn’t raining, or we hadn’t been exclusively socialising in old man pubs since we were 16, and I hadn’t lived on this high street all my life until last year meaning that it now feels like an inherently silly anti-home, then this thing would be hell. But the mood is good.
I ask him his thoughts on it. Call it atmosphere and ambience. He tells me his lady friend wears the wrong socks. No matter how good the rest of the outfit is, the socks are wrong, which may sound superficial, until you’re ten years down the line and don’t trust your partner’s values enough to open a shared bank account. A fashion editor or a stylist or somebody once said that hardly any of your style is what you wear and the art you hang in your house. Instead, it's in the the gulf between that art and the art you actually like; the modes of transport you opt for and the way you store your umbrellas. Whether you add pepper to scrambled eggs before you whisk them. And when whatever’s in your orbit rubs up nicely against someone else’s orbit at a specific time and place that suits the conjunction, maybe that’s the mood.
I’m twenty minutes late to my shift that evening. Most respectable excuses wouldn’t cover this. But because I show up drunk with hoop earrings, the landlord just hands me a cider. And a quid for the jukebox.
anti-home :)