I saw John Pilger in a supermarket in Clapham

“I saw John Pilger in a supermarket in Clapham.
“I was in the supermarket looking for something to go with the six jars of Hellman’s mayonnaise one of my housemates kept at the back of the kitchen cupboard. He added a jar every time he went shopping, which was about once a month – it must have been something to do with his grant. He’d come home, open the mayonnasie, make a sandwich, then stash the mayonnaise in the cupboard and forget about it.
“I had three loaves of rye bread, a pound of sliced ham and a dozen tomatoes that looked like they’d come all the way from Turkey in a rusty shipping container. I was going to make sandwiches. Ham on rye. Ha ha.”
“So I thought a bottle of wine might be the go, instead of the usual Colt 45s from the off-license that my housemates drank. I lived with a guy called Dave – the mayonnaise man – who was doing a PhD, and a programmer who did something for a newspaper that I never understood. It was summer, and we sat up late drinking beer and listening to soul and hip-hop on the local pirate radio station, which was run by a bunch of Rastafarian dope dealers out of an old shopfront in the high street. They had the neighbourhood drug trade and the local music scene tied up and they never tolerated anyone trying to muscle in on their bandwith or their street corners. Or so I heard.
“We were in this big house near Willesden Junction, a Victorian with sort of two-and-a-half stories. I had a little bedroom off the stair landing half-way up at the back, and there was always washing strung from lines in the stairwell and a procession of people who came and went in the other bedrooms: a woman from Chile, then an African guy studying at some college or other and for a while, just before I moved out, another Australian, who worked in the shop at the Victoria and Albert.”
“You know that thing in summer in England when the sun never seems to set, and then when it does, it rises again straight away, or it seems to. I used to wake up in the early hours of the morning with a vague headache from the Colt 45s and a feeling that I had to hurry up and do something useful.
“I was running through my savings and it was time to get a job, but at the same time I was doing this acting course and I thought I might get into that more. I had my degree and I thought something good would come up sooner or later.
“Sometimes I called people who were doing things I thought sounded interesting. There was this woman documentary maker from New York that I heard about through a friend, and I phoned her production company to see if there might be a research job going or something, but it was like Fort Knox.
“One day, not long after I first arrived, I went down to Brick Lane and bought a bicycle off a guy standing on the street corner. It was too small for me, and freshly stolen, I’m sure. The guy disappeared as soon as I handed over the 20 quid. But I had the bike, and I rode it all over the place, fearless and stupid – down Tottenham Court Road, around Oxford Circus in the traffic, anywhere. That’s what I did a lot of days – rode the too-small stolen bike to check out some part of London.
“Then I met this Canadian guy, Duncan, in a pub. We were talking, and I said I wasn’t doing anything much in particular – I think I said I was looking for an opening – and he said he had a band, and was looking for a girl singer. So I said I’d try out and I gave him my phone number. I thought he was probably just putting the moves on me, but we just talked more about music and what it was like living in London, and then he left. But a couple of days later he called and said the band was going to be rehearsing the next day and could I come down and sing.
“So I had one of those moments – you know, will I, won’t I? When you launch yourself into something on the spur of the moment without thinking it through, and then you have to go through with it. I mean, I could have just not gone and I probably would never have heard from the guy again. Then I thought, fuck it, why not, what have I got to lose? So the next day I got on my bike and road down there, right across London.
“Duncan lived in Clapham, in a big squat with about 15 other people who were all Canadians or Americans, and they all seemed to be in the band. When they played live, he said, there would be five guitarists and two drummers and a whole lot of people playing keyboards and horns. About half-a-dozen of them played through some songs a couple of times, then gave me a lyric sheet to sing. I was as nervous as anything, and the lyrics were pretty strange, but I could sing: I was in the choir at school and we'd all been coached by a real singing teacher. Anyway, I must have gone all right, because he said he thought I might work out. He gave me some tapes and a load more lyrics and said I should go away and learn the songs, and he’d call me to arrange another time for me to rehearse with them.
“I thought, great, I’m going to be in this band. Finally, it’s beginning to work out, just the way it’s supposed to when you go to London. I went home and listened to the tapes and spent the next few days wandering around the house wearing a Walkman and singing these strange songs: arty, intellectual lyrics, layers of guitars, all heavily ironic.
“Then, of course, I didn’t hear from Duncan for about a few days, then a week, then two weeks.
“Finally, I got on the bike and rode down there again, to the squat, looking for him. When I got there a builder’s crew were putting up scaffolding: the house was getting a renovation. Everyone was gone – Duncan, the band, the whole lot of them.
“I didn’t know what to do. I got on the bike and just rode around for a while. Then I saw this supermarket. I got off the bike and went inside, thinking, I’ll buy something to make a nice lunch. Then I remembered the mayonnaise … it was a perverse moment – ham, rye, mayonnaise. And a bottle of vino.
“So there I was, standing in the continental liquor department of this Tesco’s or maybe it was a Sainsbury’s, trying to choose between a bottle of Alsace riesling and some cheap Italian paint stripper.
“John Pilger was buying wine, too. He smiled at me when he saw I was looking at him. I was holding a bottle of wine in each hand, weighing them up. I thought, ‘I should just ask him for a job now.’ I had a my degree, I could do research for him.
“I don’t want to sound like a tosser. But it was like the time in New York when Matt Dillon told me I’d never be a pop star or the time I went to Tokyo with the vague idea of getting into acting for television commercials. It was already too late.”