A Polish man with red hair combed into a side parting arrives with a steaming plate of egg, baked beans, sausage, mushroom, and chips.

"Your toast is coming"

You are sipping Earl Grey tea in a small cafeteria opposite the gates to Finsbury Park. The food is cheap, the decor is simple and the windows are large enough to see the big dirty city squinting outside. Pedestrians walk purposefully by with hands in pockets, moving from Point A to Point B, under a blanket of dust and grime, past black rubber and asphalt, in phase with the traffic lights, on the unsleeping floor, babbling, limping, but limping with purpose.

It is a London Sunday, the afternoon masquerading as morning after another long lay-in.
The cafe is half empty and mostly people sit alone at the small tables: a pensioner, a paraplegic, a small group of students, a Senegalese mother feeding chips to her young boy. The eyes in the faces sparkle with untold stories.

A man enters. He is very old. His clothes are worn and dirty. His face is strangely empty: a mass of thick white skin caving in beneath a tattered woolen hat. His eyes - pale, pale blue, almost white, like a wolfs eyes - fix upon the North African girl behind the counter. He smiles a little and orders a tea, lingering whilst she busies herself, wanting to talk. In a soft Scottish accent he asks her if she will give him a photograph of herself.

"Leave me alone Edward, you know I wont do that" she says, with a tone of playful reproach.

Edward takes his tea and goes to sit down. He moves stiffly across the room, hardly bending his legs with each step. His trousers are disheveled - both too short and too wide - and have gathered up into the crease of his arse. Perplexing, you think, the effects of age on the human arse. Finally he places his tea on the table and sits, pulling a ragged newspaper from the pocket of his stained brown jacket.

The gentle creases around his pale eyes spread like capillaries as he reads, lifting an elbow to bring the mug towards his lips, the hot liquid making them shine. He swallows slowly, revealing more wrinkles around his mouth, leafless trees creaking against a white winter sky.

The strange old man turns his pale eyes towards the North African waitress.

"When will you be in again Jessica?" he asks.

"Next weekend" she replies, unperturbed.