As I was walking back from the tube on my way home from the Andrew Collings' show a small, thin man, probably in his fifties, with a complexion that suggested that he might enjoy a drink. The slight wobble in his walk and distracted look in his eye suggested that he might just have enjoyed a drink or four this afternoon.
He caught my eye as he approached and indicated behind me (not directly behind me thank goodness) before observing wistfully, "I haven't seen an arse like that for years." He smiled a knowing and naughty smile at me. I assumed he was talking about the arse of the woman who I had just passed and though I can not approve of the way he was objectifying her as a sex object I felt I had to look. The man looked like he had seen a lot of arses in his life and this one was so extraordinary he thought it was worth notifying a stranger of its existence. Perhaps the arse was able to juggle or was singing a song through its tiny mouse-hole. That's why I looked round. Not because I thought that the arse might be a sexually stimulating sight.
But the arse itself was not extraordinary at all. The woman was in her twenties and on the large size of average and wearing jeans and the arse that had caused the consternation whilst not without its charms was the kind that one would see twenty or thirty times a day if one spent all one's time walking around the streets surreptitiously examining the arses of women and men. I imagine. I don't ever look at arses or compare them with other arses I have seen and anyone who says I do that and that I have a note-book at home which I have entitled "Arses I have observed, compared and contrasted" which I have decorated with pictures of arses that I have cut out of magazines stuck on with sellotape, is deliberately distorting the truth.
The man looked like he had looked at a lot of arses and might have such a notebook and yet he claimed that he had not seen an arse like this for years. I can only assume he has spent the last decade chained to a radiator in a basement (though if that's the case his captors have been kind enough to keep him continually supplied with booze) or maybe had just regained his sight after a long period of blindness and was just sharing his delight at seeing anything and it just happened that this arse was in his field of vision at the time.
It certainly wasn't worth wasting the time of a stranger by making him have to turn around and look at the arse, which although maybe slightly unusually pert and undrooping for an arse of that size would only appear as a foot-note in any serious notebook comparing people's arses to other people's arses.
It wasn's something that warranted discussion with someone you didn't know, unlike the death of
Richard Whiteley who was in his own way a bit of an arse. But an unusual arse who only comes along once every decade, rather than this arse which is ten a penny in the Shepherd's Bush area.
That is probably the only conversation me and that man will ever have in our lives and that was what he felt was the most important thing to tell me? I wouldn't have minded if the arse had been a bit more extraordinary.
But I suppose it suggests that this man once knew a girl with an arse like that and something happened between them, but now times of change and the arse had drooped and he has become a drunk and he will never recapture those golden days. But ah he has his memories.
Of a normal arse that was extraordinary to him.
