Have you been out today?

Yesterday...

I am lunching, in very fine company, in Martin's Coffee House - the closest thing to a greasy spoon that we have left in Cambridge since the incomparable Athena on Norfolk St closed down some years ago. Spectacles are on my nose and my mind. After ten years, I feel I've had my money's worth out of my current frames and would like some new ones. This makes me notice the spectacles of others. In particular there was a pair of oval shaped plastic frames I saw on a chap a week or so ago. I believe something similar might suit me rather well but the current vogue is for the long thin rectangle ("media wanker glasses" as I believe Pete Ashton calls them) and so ovals are proving hard to find. I have a mouthful of bacon sarnie and I am staring at a man in the queue. Interesting frames. Not quite what I was thinking of but similar. Worth some thought. So I am staring at the man in the queue and I am staring at the man in the queue and I am considering his glasses. And then it occurs to me that I am in fact staring at Loyd Grossman. Bollocks! Now I look like the sort of person who is impressed by celebrity. I look like the sort of person who would stare at Loyd Grossman in a queue. Bollocks! Only, no, it's all right. It's not Loyd Grossman, just someone who looks a little like him. Not even all that much like him now I think of it. And surely if it were him then he'd be up the road in Brown's. He gets his order, sits down near the window and I do not see his spectacles again.

Some time passes. I forget all about the man and his glasses. Sandwiches and beverages are successfully consumed. We depart, and as we do so hear a truly unmistakable voice - American but unplaceably so, and with those bizarre vowel sounds - drifting up from a seat near the window.