Diaries: February 19-22, 2022

Urinal encounters, and celebrity encounters real and imagined

February 19, Notting Hill, London

I was in the toilet in the pub today when a man with dreadlocks came in and said “ahhh, piss, can’t beat a good piss!”

“Mhmm,” I replied. Then he knocked on the tiles and said, “I like this tiling!” to which I replied, “you should redo your bathroom with them.” He liked this quite a lot.

The thing that stood out to me most about the interaction, apart from the fact that I was holding my penis at the time, was that he said you ‘can’t beat’ a piss. I don’t know about you, but I could pick at least three things I’d like to be doing at any one time more than having a piss.

I’m not sure whether it’s a weirder interaction than the time I was in a toilet in a theatre in Sheffield with my then-girlfriend’s dad. I wasn’t sure how to respond when he turned to me from his urinal and said, “did you know this used to be a cloakroom?”

February 21, Queen’s Park, London

I had a dream last night that I saw the singer Billie Eilish on a street in London. When I woke up and realised it had been a dream, I was disappointed, not because I particularly wanted to meet Billie Eilish, but because had I actually seen her, it would have been my best London celebrity sighting by far.

Before I moved here someone I know said they were once on the tube and saw someone that they thought looked like Jude Law. Then they looked closer, and realised it was Jude Law. Someone else had seen Keira Knightley going about her business. These and a couple of other examples of a-list run ins had given me unreasonable expectations on whom I would encounter on the streets of London.

My list so far is, at best, niche:

1.     I saw the once-actor and now professional arsehole Laurence Fox in a pub in Primrose Hill.

2.     I sat across from the writer Will Self on the Northern line with a friend from university who had no idea who he was.

3.     That same friend and I saw the former MP and your uncle’s favourite television presenter Michael Portillo filming something in Westminster. Presumably another riveting BBC Four programme about trains that I would pretend to dislike.

4.     The comedian David Baddiel walked past me in Camden Market looking glum, though this was mid-pandemic, when everyone looked glum or shellshocked.

5.     On a date with my girlfriend, the actor Russell Tovey walked into the bar in Soho that we were walking out of. We had the burgers, I’m not sure what Russell Tovey had.

6.     Frank Skinner passed me on a street in Hampstead with a child that I assumed was his.

7.     I was very excited to see the former England cricket captain Michael Atherton in a pub in Notting Hill. I did not say hello, instead I sat there and stared.

8.     I was ever-so-slightly less excited to see the former England cricketer Ian Ward in the same pub in Notting Hill on the same night that I saw Michael Atherton. It’s not personal to Ian, I just have a crush on Athers that even I can’t explain.

9.     And finally, I saw Eddie Izzard near Notting Hill Gate tube station.

Essentially, if you’d like to see celebrities who were most famous somewhere around the early 2000’s, I’m your man. It’s not a terrible list, and I certainly hope it will get better. But still, I recently met someone who has seen Jude Law not once but twice, which really is taking the piss.

February 22, Leyton, London

I’m listening to Ben Aitken’s The Gran Tour on Audible at the moment. It’s his book about taking various coach holidays with lots of elderly people, and I was annoyed to hear he had seen the actor Michael Fassbender on his trip to Killarney. I was annoyed because Michael Fassbender blows the celebrities on my list out of the water.

Then Aitken talked about Fassbender’s preparation for the film Hunger, in which he played IRA member Bobby Sands. Because the film centres around Bobby Sands’ hunger strike, Fassbender underwent a ten-week long fast where he ate only 900 calories a day. According to his Wikipedia page, he also skipped, did yoga, walked, had trouble sleeping and had to stop seeing friends. He said the experience made him feel “grateful” and “strong.”

I read this and thought that eating only 900 calories a day would make me almost, but not quite as annoyed as the fact that everyone seems to be bumping into Oscar nominees but me.