kultur for sale

Al fresco, in ones & twos, at the Fiddlers' Cafe I walked past & into ADAM'S BARBERS and took a seat straight away. Today was the short stout barber that took the clippers - I usually get his tall thin colleague with hair down to his waste. I always enjoy this : the politics of making nano-talk chat last for as long as the cut takes. There is only the two barbers and me in the shop & as he cuts we watch the snooker on the portable box in the corner of the shop (I listen, looking at my self in the mirror - but even my barber manages to watch). Grown men depart pixels of colour for our pleasure to earn - if Hendry can make this maximum - ten times an annual barber's wage in nine minutes. I start to respect the multi- tasking of the man with the cut-throat. Michael Ayres - one of the most under-rated living poets - once wrote that a barber is a cross between a baptist & an executioner. My neck is wet. Hendry misses. We all relax. The cut comes to nine, I leave...

The early bird gets the big price, red & blue balloons orb the doors, bowls of peanuts & crisps on the Quickslip Desk, jockeys wait to go over the top of Beecher's Brook in luminescent stripes like danger needs a dusting of hundreds & thousands - well that's why we're watching - outside two middleaged men seriously playfight as their young sons watch trying not to catch the eyes of the other. I push the pram past an unmanned buggy which has been left next to a GOLDSKIP of used bricks. Coming back much later after the poetry reading in Covent Garden - a past midnight of Spring ice - the driver of the Transit cab could be one of the men from today's playfight. He says : cheer up, it might never happen. He pleasantly talks past me like I am the clothes in his wardrobe. I say : it already has, I've spent all my money on the National & I'm not even drunk. He asks how I failed to pick the winner, though he hasn't told his wife about his winnings ye...