Clapham omnibus

I am in the dark Victorian hall of the Anglican pop-in. Old ladies are serving; with me at my table is a shy accountant from Guyana; at the other is a mothers' and toddlers' group. A boy is also present, waiting for his father; he comes to sit next to me.

It is okay to talk to children in these circumstances, so I ask him what he is studying at school. He says that he is concentrating on maths, because his best subject is history.

"That was my best subject too," I say. "When I was your age, I knew the names and dates of all the English kings and queens by heart."



"Do you still know them?"

"Well, probably not all. From the Tudors onwards, I do."

We go through the Tudors a little, but he says he knows more about the Victorians. We come to the Crimean war, and I ask him who was the great heroine of that conflict.

"Hitler!" he says wildly.

We laugh. Then, after a brief discussion of Florence Nightingale, he asks me whether Hitler was a very bad man.

"He is generally considered to be very bad indeed," I say.

"What did he do?"

"Well, in 1941 he invaded Russia, and in the course of that operation, he exterminated a vast number of people, around 6m, mostly Jews."

"That was bad," he says.

"Well, yes, I think it was," I say, rather relieved that I have convincingly demonstrated the badness of Hitler.

"What other bad men were there?"

I think for a little. "Well, there was also Genghis Khan. He was a Mongol leader, and marauded around Asia. He killed an awful lot of people."

"Stalin was pretty bad too," puts in the accountant.

I expand on several more dictators, but I start to lose the boy's interest. He goes off to play the piano.

I pay my ?2 for lunch, and make an arrangement with one of the old ladies to have tea with her on Sunday. Then I walk back to my flat through the quiet mid-day streets of Clapham, and go to bed. Perhaps it is because I am now middle-aged that I sleep after lunch. But I have always loved going to bed in the afternoons. It began in my first term at Oxford and has never stopped. I have rarely lasted long in a job, and always lived on whatever the benefit system was currently called. I could say, with Louis XIV, "L'?tat, c'est moi."

The subtle and beautiful music of Rachmaninoff's early opera Aleko, drifting towards my bed from the radio in the other room, rouses me. With great enthusiasm, I decide to go to the west end. A train is almost due, so I rush to the station. There is a great crowd waiting, although just one trainspotter on the bridge. (Once I saw four there, all dressed in long black overcoats.)

Sometimes I think back to the station in the early 1980s, when there were almost no trains, and I used to be quite alone on the overgrown platform, eating my sandwich lunch. It is very different now that Connex has come, with its flower-boxes and CCTV cameras. The great Eurostar passes, and countless goods trains. There are station parties. I meet people on the platforms who are travelling to strange churches.

Arriving in the west end, I call in at the London Library. There I notice in a magazine that a sad writer I know has finally had her story printed, six years after it was accepted. The slight chill felt by any writer at the success of another is neutralised by my knowledge of how much she suffers.

I contemplate going to a caf? I often frequent, in Piccadilly. There used to be a handsome Portuguese waiter there, but he walked out, after a row with the manageress. I haven't been back since I discovered this, and wonder now whether I ought to go, to show the manageress that it was not simply because of him that I came. But first I wander into Tower Records, where with delight I buy a new CD of Irmgard Seefried singing Schubert, Brahms and Wolf songs. Joy of joys, there is also an interview with Irmgard. My devotion to her, and to this music, will never die.

I come home via Clapham Junction, in order to buy a bottle of Moscato, which I like to have beside me when I write. There is a delay at the checkout in Asda, and a young man and I move to the next till. We talk cheerfully about how such manoeuvres add spice to life, but then when I come to pay I ask him for a penny. He has nothing so small, and a chill falls between us.

A few minutes later I see him on the upper desk of the bus, sitting in front of me, beyond the stairs. We each have one Asda bag-probably both travelling to our solitary suppers. He gets out one stop before mine, near a grim estate, and I smile nervously at him. I move forward as he descends, and notice that his bag is still on the seat.

Downstairs the doors clang shut and the bus moves on. I signal to him outside, but he does not see me. I go downstairs with the bag. But if I walk back along the road, am I likely to find such an absent-minded young man?

It feels like the start of a warmhearted novel by my late friend Robert Rubens. Dear Robert would have rushed back with the bag and created an encounter. But I am not Robert, and I hand the shopping to the bus driver. Why does every day gain an inevitable sadness for me?