self portrait

The Old Man on the Seat.

Just finished a 12 hour shift at work, my eyes are weary, I can’t wait to get home. I hop down the stairs to get to the northern line platform at Tottenham court road, hoping to get a seat. I suddenly hear the beeping sound of the train doors closing; I rush to the platform and just made it onto the train. I jump for the first seat I see which was the only seat left in the train carriage.

I start observing the surroundings of the people on the train, and there he was, the old man on the seat, wearing tanned cotton trousers, a tartan shirt with the first 4 buttons undone showing a dirty white singlet. His trainers looked like they had a good hard run in life, as they looked as old as he was.

The old man pulls out an faded blue plastic lunch box out from his backpack, he opens it up and takes out what looks to be a hand made leather pouch wrapped in shoe lace, carefully and slowly he unwrapped the shoe lace and reveals something I was not expecting, it wasn’t his penny pouch nor his tobacco pouch, but a pouch for his shinny IPhone 3GS, I knew it was a 3GS because he was holding it up to the roof of the train to try and get signal. I smiled and was glad I hopped down those stairs.

Gordon Baker

Mark Whitfield

Mark is a rad regular that comes in usually on a saturday morning

and takes photos of my coffees.

MARK WHITFIELD