Just a day in the life of whomever

When the first and only friend I’ve ever had from Russia insisted that I write about proceedings that, to me, were quotidian and unremarkable, I reeled at the surprise of someone throwing my advice back at me.

My happy side hustle in copy-editing sees me take text and make it good. And I do that when I’m asked, but editing gives me the keys to something more important, something that involves the magic of writing things down.

The magic is elusive if you’re selling something or rushing to put your manager’s words to paper. It gets activated when you tell your story. What I want from you non-writers is something your therapist also wants: an honest examination of yourself and what happens when you move through the world.

The cartoonishness and punchy yellow cover of my high-school writing textbook is apt: Writers Inc billed itself as ‘a guide to writing, thinking and learning’ as it examined the human side of wordsmithing, using quotes, humour and illustration to bring the practice alive for disaffected teenagers. ‘By the time you finish high school,’ it told me at age 14, ‘you will have seen and felt enough of life to fill a Nobel prize-winning novel’. And it didn’t even know my school was a cult! Clever book.

If you never leave the house, or have cooked family meals every day for years, or are traipsing briskly down the halls of your busy office wondering whether your kindergarten-aged child ever thinks about you, you have something to offer – to yourself and to your audience, even if it’s an audience of one.

As a writing practice moves you closer to honesty, it also moves your readers closer, and though I can’t claim the truth will set you free, it will put you in a place that you will not wish, post-writing, to retrench from. ‘Writing does that,’ says Writers Inc:

It helps you make meaning out of your experiences. You may not always like what you discover when you write, but, if you give writing an honest chance, it will help you to better understand you and the people you care for. What could be more important than that?

And here I’ve got Ivan the Russian telling me to tell you about the time that a woman asked me for a cigarette and then disappeared, leaving her partner to pick up the conversational pieces. Lest I risk hypocrisy, I better do it.

<Sigh> Okay, here we go: we are on a narrow road, in the centre of a neighbourhood that invokes refined comfort. The hotels are old and grand, the restaurants get a lot of press, and people wear clothes that you see in magazines. The pub we’re standing outside advertises its beer from a brewery that could almost convincingly trace its beginnings to the 1550s?… It can’t, but still, that’s London – you know: old stuff.

The pub’s kitchen turns out British fare with the sort of prowess you won’t find in any pub in the country I’m from, Canada. Ivan eats the lamb chops unseasoned and without condiments, and he keeps coming back for more.

On this day, however, we’ve just got our beers, and it’s crowded outside, with drinkers mostly of the financial and property type, and some techies. Careerists flock. For better or worse, a little lazy eavesdropping gets you plenty of mentions of deals, turnarounds, shares, bonds. I don’t register that stuff much, though I’m frequently in the middle of it at work.

And now, with the delicacy required for such aesthetic matters, let me describe the woman who approached us as lithe, soft-spoken, well dressed, and used to asking strangers for what she wants. Her look, whatever I mean by that, is not uncommon around here, but we didn’t have the cigarette she was after.

I thought that was the end of it, but then Ivan offered to roll a cigarette, a skill he picked up when he moved here two years ago. Polite of him, to be sure, but I dreaded the awkwardness of them standing around while this got sorted out. Where would we look?

Our unnamed interlocutor asked the chap she was with, standing a few feet behind her, if a rollie would do, and he said yes.

She and this chap had the energy of people who were having fun together, like a couple after three drinks. But when the replacement offer of a rollie was accepted, the chap took her place in front of us, and she wandered off.

That was weird.

And then he told us, though we didn’t ask, with a toothiness that suggested either intoxication or an exceedingly sunny disposition, that he had met the woman thirty minutes beforehand and she had invited him up to her flat. His description was airy, delighted and incredulous, as if he was wondering what was happening himself.

Their adventure had begun after he’d made some offhand, jokey comment to her, and she suggested a drink in the Connaught, a Mayfair hotel whose cheaper rooms start at around ￡1,300 a night. Once seated, she wouldn’t accept anything alcoholic and the hotel wouldn’t accept her coffee order at 6pm. She pushed the subject with the very formal, very European waitstaff – fielding repeated requests for the same thing is an occupational hazard when everything you sell is that expensive; a glass of 2021 Chablis Vielle Vignes goes for ￡28, an Americano for ￡7.95 – but they demurred. Her new friend had two drinks.

And now our new friend, whose name I’ll render, with literary decorum, as F., was relating this without gauging the crowd’s interest, if you follow. Sometimes I get punished for my politeness, but better that than making people regret talking to strangers. Ivan has more leeway for this kind of spontaneous confab; he’s newish to London and possessed of an interest in new people that I may not share. Still, he’s wary; the conflict in Ukraine has opened him up to scrutiny and careless accusations from pub-goers. Two weeks ago he gently asked me not to volunteer to strangers where he’s from.

But it was an Englishman’s vulnerability that had Ivan worried here. As F. was recounting all these details about people I hadn’t known five minutes ago and would presumably never think about again, I was waiting for it to be over, while Ivan was starting to get suspicious. F. seemed a little high.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ Ivan asked.

‘Yes,’ replied F.

‘Have you ever heard of the band The Ramones?’ Ivan asked.

‘Yes,’ F. answered.

‘They have a song called “Somebody Put Something in My Drink”.’

As segues go, this was a little on the nose, but Ivan didn’t let that stop him, and he continued: ‘Do you feel like you’re behaving normally?’

I wasn’t ready at this stage to name the concern, but hey, Ivan is Russian and the rules are different. And F. didn’t seem put out by it.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I feel fine.’

This came as some relief to me, and seemed credible. F. was just one of those people who gets quite happy on slightly less than two drinks, à la Mitchell & Webb. Also subduing my concern was the fact that F. wasn’t just passing through. He was a local.

What Ivan wants me to describe with this story is, for instance, F.’s bearing and dress sense. Beyond the elevated standards for suits found in this part of the world, F. sported a shirt, trousers and shoes without socks in a way that the highly stylish manage, which is to say I registered his sartorial know-how, taking simple elements and making them look that good, but I lack both the vocabulary to describe them and the ability to pull it off myself. My clothes are pretty bad, but F. knew what he was effecting, and it wasn’t the white-bread style of a businessperson. Terribly fashionable people wander these streets, and he was one of them.

When F. identified himself as an actual shoe manufacturer, and based in Savile Row, no less, his personal style made sense. Of course his clothes were that cool, then; he thought about this stuff professionally. In my field, finance, our dress sense is like our writing: adequate, sometimes better than average, and conservative. It’s worse in downtown Toronto, where there’s money to pay for nice fabrics, but money can’t buy taste. Those suits seldom fit.

The next step in this sharing jamboree was a picture of F.’s mate attending a wedding in a white suit adorned with somehow very tasteful large black ovals. (‘He looks like the Spider-Man villain The Spot,’ observed Ivan.) F. was charged with matching the suit with the right shoes, a challenge F. rose to, and while I can scarcely remember the photo, the shoes fitted, as it were, and F. had crafted them himself.

Satisfied with his rollie and two strangers who were listening attentively, F. kept talking, and when sushi came up incidentally, I focused. I seldom order sushi in London because the good stuff is eye-wateringly expensive, and the middle-of-the-road stuff isn’t for me, but my love for it is real. F. and I moved from The Araki’s loss of all three of its Michelin stars to the offerings of Umu, a restaurant twenty steps from the flat he was being invited into that night, and which serves a ￡65 bento box for lunch that I covet. (No one accuses me of refined taste in general; it’s just bad luck that expensive Japanese food is my favourite.) F. highlighted his connections to a Japanese chef bringing surprising quality in raw fish to a North London neighbourhood called Golders Green. I endure name-dropping congenially in this part of town, but this was a connection I could be emotionally invested in. A referral to this purveyor of important victuals could be useful; his previous role was as the Japanese ambassador’s private chef (or something like that; these details bounce off me, but Ivan clocked it). F. gave me the chef’s contact details, exclaiming, ‘No one else has this number!’

Meanwhile, the name of F.’s paramour remained unspoken – maybe he didn’t know it – and it turned out she lived on the very street this whole Mayfair tableau was unfurling on. My street. I’ve lived here since the iPad launched, but I didn’t recognise her. Still, the hazards were fading away. Both she and F. were locals, and any untoward outcome wouldn’t go without a reckoning and was therefore even more unlikely. Our concern dissipated, and we went back to that most British of institutions.

(The drinking, silly.)

I put this twenty-minute slice of life to you, readers, as standard. Threads of cuisine, fashion, wealth and power weave through London’s W1 streets while I blithely drink my pint, armed with a polite Canadian bearing and making sure that I worry more about the drunk passers-by than my own antipathy around entertaining people I don’t know. And, hey, it’s not that hard; I have a beer.

And so, Wherefore art thou, wise American textbook of high school English? How now, Writers Inc.? What am I to understand about myself or my people from just, you know, hanging around the city?

The idea of writing about sushi, Savile Row tailoring, maybe-trysts that start at the Connaught, and the sheer expense of it all makes me roll my eyes. But Ivan thinks I’m crazy to restrict my output to matters that resonate with me. Turns out this whole interchange was something he’d dine out on.

Urging others, as I do, not to wait for a shiny event to materialise, I can’t make excuses about neglecting to write while insisting they’re not to make the same mistake – not without a pang of hypocrisy, anyway. It’s venial enough, perhaps, if I just open a document and start typing. As should you.