Alvi greets me at his front door. He holds up two small pine cones for me to
see. Laughing, I reach in to my bag and
pull out … a pineapple ! You can see from
his expression that his little brain is already engaging with problems of difference
and similarity.
Walking through the dark rainy streets to the factory, above
the roar of two cheese lorries backing on to their loading bays just before four in the morning, the night
loader Winston Heavens’ radio is playing. I hear, and then recognize in only two or three seconds, the
opening bars of Talking Heads' Once In A Lifetime (Same As It ever Was); same as it ever was indeed, because that riff excites me now just as much as the first time I heard it in the
Dug Out thirty something years ago. I pause to stand there in the rain, briefly enraptured
School is out for some, and all along the Wandsworth Road, and down
in Nine Elms it is a great sunny afternoon for tiny children of every race and
colour to be out walking with their grandparents.
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