1.

A few years back, I spent a month getting up every day just before dawn and sitting with my back to a particular tree, out of the way in the corner of the park by the railway. I wasn’t meditating, exactly, but just trying to feel something about the dawn and the trees and the park before anyone else was up and about. One morning around five-thirty, a man and a dog entered at the far side of the park. It was a big black beast, and as the man bent to take off its lead he looked up and saw me in the distance. He hesitated, then unclipped the lead anyway. The dog rocketed straight for me barking loudly. My non-meditative meditation was shattered. The man strolled over and unhurriedly pulled the dog off me.

“Dogs are supposed to be on leads in this park,” I said, wiping slobber off my trousers and aware that my heart was pounding.

The man snarled. “What are you doing, sitting in a fecking park anyway?”

They left me to wonder about this strange situation. I figured that at one level what he really meant was, What are you doing in my fecking park. And perhaps at another, it was an example of the British people’s strange attitude towards their pets, that they will put them before people. After all, he saw me, thought about it and then unleashed his dog on me. And maybe another level still is people’s deep suspicion of anyone who isn’t doing what’s expected. Parks are for taking the dog for a walk in; putting the kids on slides, playing football, maybe shagging in the bushes. But everyone knows they’re not just for sitting in, especially at five fecking thirty in the morning.

2.

I’ve been to parts of Britain where after one visit to the local pub, the landlord is calling you by name and pulling your usual pint before you even enter the building, and you’ve been invited to dinner with half the locals and your marriage arranged to the greengrocer’s daughter. However, in my London local, it took more than a year before anyone knew my name, despite the majority there being regulars. On the other hand – and this may explain something about the character of the area – no one ever intruded on my nightly routine of drinking while writing or reading. And gradually, I got to know Harry (‘H’), Alistair, Roy and the others. I knew I’d been accepted when I went to the bar for another pint and H, who has his own stool at its corner, said, “Look at ‘im, Tel, look at ‘im!” nodding in the direction of a stranger sitting by the door.

“What’s the matter with him, Harry?”

“He’s reading a bloody book.”

This was in the 1980s when certain activities or presences in a pub were regarded as strictly suspicious (and to an extent still are): drinking coffee; a woman on her own, not a prostitute; and, perhaps worst of all, anyone reading anything other than a newspaper or the list of ingredients on a packet of dry-roasted peanuts.

“But I’m reading, H.”

He looked at me incredulously. “Yeah, but you’re one of us.”