It’s early in the big city. I’m just off Oxford Street. The shop workers pour out of the underground and bustle to their counters criss-crossing the road in a seemingly random yet purposeful fashion.
I had left the hotel in search of a more economic and down to earth breakfast and settled on an Italian café down a side street. There are only two or three other customers. The Eastern European waitress serves me. She is pleasant enough but you get the impression she is not well versed in the Full English Breakfast.
Ordering one anyway I settle into my paper and survey the other customers. There is nothing really to report. The place was clearly designed to attract tourists and I was an anomaly. It was too early for the regular punters.
Elsewhere in the room a suited businessman drank a coffee and stared into his laptop. An early shopper drank a cup of something else and soon her friend arrived. They looked as if they were steeling themselves for the effort ahead. Retail therapy without the therapy.
My unsatisfactory breakfast arrived together with a cup of tea and an orange juice. Italian cooks don’t do justice to Full English. The giant mushroom was at least artistic. I didn’t finish the breakfast, paid leaving a tip earned solely on the personality of the waitress and left for the tube.
Disappearing into the underground I felt as if I was joining the rat race.