Adrift in London

I leave the British Museum to buy something near Goodge Street. Any excuse to walk through Bedford Square; the most well preserved and elegant Georgian square in London. Memories float upwards: of strawberries and champagne in copious quantities at Architecture Association summer shows, and of the AA itself - the bright young international things I taught there, the Escherian labyrinth of rooms, and the Falstaffian figure of Marc Cousins at the centre of all things theoretikal, always drinking, consuming, thinking, provoking...

All this floods back as I walk across the square, until a man on a bench calls out.

-Excuse me. I'm not being funny, but could you tell me what day of the week it is?
He wears a dark cherry-cum-purple coloured shirt, with only two buttons done up. He has shoulder length hair, balding at the top. He looks about 45. I look into his eyes. In patches, floating on his irises lie small, quiet pools of confusion and vulnerability.
- What day do you think it is?
- Its either Friday or Saturday, but I don't know which.
- Its Saturday. How come you don't know what day it is?
- Well, I was attacked last night near Warren St. See my stitches here...
He bends forward. I cannot see anything. Perhaps there is a suture underneath the hair. Perhaps not.
- I had to go to hospital didn't I?

He then tells me a little of his life: how he liked to sit on benches around London, how he had been attacked before, how he had been taken to a pyschiatric unit for a couple of years. How he now has a little flat nearby..

London, like all the big cities of the West, produces characters like this in abundance. Cast adrift, confused into the world, clutching at meanings no longer available for their grasp, or idiot savants with visions of the apocalypse dripping into their beer cans. One can quickly become a saint, walking round, focusing one's attention on all those who have lost themselves.

The last time I was here, I tried to talk to a bag lady near Tottenham Court Road late into the night. She was large, slightly hump-backed, swaddled in dirty rags, with the usual shopping trolley of artefacts nearby. I asked if she needed anything. She flew into a salivous rage, spitting expletives at me with a Teutonic twang. I had to leave quickly.

The confused man did not want to walk with me back to the hospital. I told him if he had a head injury, he must go back for a check-up: concussion may well be the reason why he had forgotten the date. He promised me he would go later. I left him, only to bump into a reedy man with a labrador on one shoulder and an old guitar on another.

- Excuse me mate. You can't spare some change can you? I'm starving and need to feed my wife and dog...

I give him the rest of my change, riding the wave of my saintly mood, as I leave Bedford Square behind for the scramble of Tottenham Court Road.