Everything else in the neighbourhood - and most of London - was closed. For such a big city, the Old Lady goes to bed rather early. As I walked into the last pub alive, I saw the tall, thin lady under the darkest shadow of the alley. She was very clearly crying, and doing her best to pretend not to.

Does that make sense?

Three Brits joined me at my table. She joined us later. She was drunk and wanted to know why we were drinking. She asked in an eastern European accent: she needed to know why the British drunk so much.

"Because we enjoy it," Symington's girlfriend said.

"But why?"

"Because it makes us feel happier."

We had a long conversation after that.  She asked many uncomfortable questions. She cried a lot. She had broken up with her boyfriend. Their sexlife wasn't great, but that's a story for another day. She told us a lot. Probably more than we wanted to know. Definitely more than we needed to know.

At one point, one of the boys got up and brought back a round of shots for everybody. We raised our tiny glasses.

"What is the happiness for this?" She asked. Nobody said anything for a very long time. And then, Symington's girlfriend replied:

"There is no happiness."

A drunken lad was trying to catch a pigeon that was sleeping on the roof of an old grey car. Young boys were stealing the newly rebranded Boris Bikes. Two Chinese girls were smoking and puking, never stopping to do one so they could keep on doing the other.

It was just another night in Waterloo. 

An afternoon at St James' Park

 

He had tattoos of Mary,  Jesus and the cross all over his body and a bad boy crew cut. He ran up and down St. James talking to everybody he came across. He wrestled a friend of his down to the ground. He took a selfie with two Korean girls in short skirts. He continuously harassed a group of Spanish girls nearby. He told his other friend, a young smart-looking man: "suck my cock. Suck my cock 59 times!"

He came to talk to me too, as I was reading, sitting under the Mandela tree. He grabbed a great big branch that had fallen off. He asked me in a sort of Cockney accent:

"You seek enlightenment bruv? I can teach you. Dualism. We can observe our feelings, and our movements and our thoughts. You can observe them, I can observe them. Then we can not be any of these things. Can an object observe itself? No; see what I mean? You are now free from your thoughts, your feelings and your movements. These things are no longer you. You are become all-powerful, almost like a god."

The guru of Bow church swung the stick around him as he spoke.

"I can teach you. I can teach you lots of things. I have more than 500 books back home and I have read them all. The only problem is, right? Here's something for you to think about: You are not experiencing suffering, you are suffering experiencing. How's that hey? Makes you think, right? Dualism, bruv. You're welcome!"

He marched away again, still swinging and swirling the branch around him. People in purple t-shirts add colour to the park.