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Last Thursday night, I went out with my friends, Sex-Ed Tom, Will, and Hermione. The three of them knew each other from work, as they belonged to the same science department at the school.
Science was never my subject – it ripped the magic out of the world. For instance, It’s not “a king looking down at us from the night sky” – it’s a massive, luminous sphere of gas, primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, that shines due to the energy of nuclear fusion in its core. See what I mean.
However, I do like my science friends, so I was more than happy to spend time with them. (Lucky them).
The last time we met up was Valentine’s Day. I had a plan to gather my single friends to throw some darts at Flight Club, but our coupled friends found out, and they wanted to join too. I was tempted to say, “YOU CAN ONLY PLAY IF NOBODY LOVES YOU.” But I bit my tongue. After all, the reason why I was alone on Valentine’s was because of my pettiness.
On this Thursday evening, the meeting place was Paddington Market Hall.
Market Halls are like posh cafeterias that have popped up across London. They are venues filled with street food kitchens from around the world, such as tacos and gourmet burgers, and food that this country only discovered in 2014, like ramen and bao buns.
You are given a giant pager that dramatically vibrates when your food is ready, and then you are handed a tray with your dinner on it. I’m still unsure whether it’s a step forward or back in the dining-out experience.
I found Tom and Will upstairs in the Market Hall, on a bench in matching corduroy shirts. Tom was in a cream one and Will was in green. I couldn’t make fun of them, though, because I was also wearing a corduroy shirt, exactly the same, except mine was blue. Things took a turn for the worse when Hermione turned up wearing her satsuma-colored dungarees, which were, you guessed it, corduroy.
Brilliant. We looked like presenters of a BBC craft show.
We separated to find our dinner and reunited with our trays. On our table, we had a gourmet burger, a hummus salad, a Turkish wrap, tacos, and Tom had chips. He offered that I could help myself to them.
“I’ll just take one,” I announced, then ate at least ten.
Bellies full, we wandered to Little Venice. The reason for our meet-up was Sex Ed Tom had bought tickets to NewsRevue, a parody sketch show about current affairs.
The theatre was on the first floor of a pub, in a black room with a basic stage and round tables and chairs crammed in. Each skit lasted a minute or so. The story about the Atlantic journalist in the WhatsApp group was done to Adele’s Hello. There was a tap-dancing Zelenskyy to ‘Putin on the Ritz’. And the story of the man who shoplifted Cadbury’s eggs was retold like a bad spy drama.
The Quack isn’t a review blog, as you know, but if you’re in London, you must catch a show. Every Thursday night at 7:30.
After the show ended, it was time to go crazy. We were young-ish, free-ish, and single-ish. The town was ours….Not really. It was silently agreed that our socialising cup had been filled for the day, and we were all ready for bed. (Sometimes I wished I lived more wildly so I had better content for you guys, but, hey ho).
We parted ways at Paddington. Tom and Will went back to their homes in London, and Hermione and I boarded a train back to Oxford. (Not before I got a traditional regular-decaf-oat-milk-cappuccino from Cafe Nero, though).
Just as our train pulled out Paddington, Hermione asked if I wanted to try her focaccia.
“What?” I wasn’t sure if I heard her right.
“I made homemade focaccia. Want some?”
I did hear her right.
“Are you literally carrying around a focaccia?”
She opened her Toy Story patterned backpack and brought out a slab of half-eaten Italian bread, sprinkled with salt rocks and rosemary. “I got homemade hummus, too. Want some?” She took out the tub of beige hummus.
I narrowed my eyes for a second, and then said, “Yeah. Okay.”
Even though there was a smell of McDonald’s meat filling the carriage – a signature scent in any evening train journey out of London- I was concerned for the other passangers that the stench of hummus would disturb them. Hermione doesn’t worry about such things though, so the tub was peeled open. We began tearing the bread like we were in Florence with a view of the Tuscan Hills. And not, on a train with Slough whizzing by, a woman holding a baby next to us, and some guy shouting into his phone a few rows back. Despite the ambience, it was excellent focaccia.
The train had just pulled out of Reading when. “Do you want to play a game with me?” Hermione asked. This is a common question of hers.
We have more differences than similarities, but the joy she finds in playing board games is probably one of our greatest contrasts. Every Monday night, she’s rolling dice in some café with her boyfriend, Sam. I loathe the sound of dice – it’s the sound of organised fun.
Often when I meet her at a pub or go round hers for dinner, I get bullied (strong but accurate word) into playing some obscure game, which requires Hermione to spend five minutes reading the instructions, as I color-coordinate the counters.
“Are you listening to me?” she’ll bark in her teacher’s voice.
“Yeah, yeah. The first person who picks up the ghost wins.”
Sometimes, we get to play a familiar game that doesn’t require a five-minute brief, but it still isn’t quite normal. It’s Jenga, but instead of wooden bricks, it’s a cone of fuzzy balls. Or it’s Top Trumps, but instead of celebrities… it’s buses.
That night on the train, I stood my ground.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“But it’s fun! You have to pick up a card and then guess what the other person is thinking and…”
“Or,” I interrupted. “We could do what we should be doing, which is overanalysing the thoughts and actions of men we have recently encountered.”
Hermione sunk in her seat. “Fiiiiineee.”
We were walking out of Oxford train station when Hermione announced that if the S3 was outside, she would get on it. Sure enough, the S3 was waiting at a bus stop further up the road. I saw her flinch like a dog about to catch a ball.
“You’re not going to make that,” I said
“No…” she said defeatedly, and then her steps suddenly gained speed, “BUT I’M GOING TO TRY!”
She was gone. Her backpack swung from side to side as she charged toward the Wright Streetdeck. (A very good bus to have in your hand when you’re playing Top Trumps.) She got on, and I watched the bus pull away.
“Right,” I said to myself, and then continued the walk home on my own, wishing I had something warmer than my corduroy shirt.
THE QUACK 