Reality Chokes – Pentameters Theatre, Three Horseshoes, Hampstead, 22^nd May 2008

I mentioned, a month ago, after lunch with Marlene, that the Three Horseshoes had gone. Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw it in the Metro listings. ‘The Three Horseshoes, NW3” it said. Well, how could I resist? It was the Pentameters Theatre, threatening a ‘punk rock’ play, including ‘actual performances’. Even that was not sufficient to deter me.

As I said last month, it’s really a gastlo pub now, called the Horseshoe. But, to my surprise, it served Adnam’s, gravity-fed, just like I used to get it in Suffolk. Since Suffolk is too damp for the pubs to have cellars, you probably still can. And, when I sat down, every face seemed to be a household name. Turned out the director was an actor we’ve all seen on ‘Lovejoy’, and several of that cast had chosen this evening to check it out.

When I asked for my reserved ticket, the lady in charge was really very inquisitive, wanting to know who I was and how I got to know about the performance: so I told her; told of my moment of glory forty-odd years ago. Since she has been running Pentameters here for forty years or more, she had only just missed me. She insisted on my name and address. I’m a bit worried she might try to persuade me to do it again.

It was a good play, performed with enthusiasm, and the cast did, indeed, perform some punk rock numbers. The chap sitting beside me, who had a whole dinky little armchair to himself, asked me at the interval if he had annoyed me clicking his fingernails. I assured him there was no chance that we could hear anything other than the performers. I recognised him as Dudley Sutton, who plays ‘Tinker’ in ‘Lovejoy’. He also wanted to know how I had got there: so I told him, too. Which got us onto the subject of folk singing. He does some talking blues, has put them up on YouTube. I had a look today: they’re good fun. But there is also a poem about Gentlemen’s lavatories which I really enjoyed (it’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUfLAnA3O1g if you want to see for yourself).

I got on the tube with a crowd of youngsters who had clearly been to a club of some kind. The got off stop-by-stop, with cries of “see you next week”. But they were then commented on by those left behind: very instructive.

In an echo of the play, a girl got on at Camden Town done out as a real punk. She had so much metal stuck through her she might have been in a nail-bomb explosion. And finger rings actually implanted in stretched ear lobes. I could only keep my gorge down by not looking at her. Although, like boxing, there is something magnetically attractive about such things.

The Southeastern trains were very busy. It must be because the Adnam’s made me a bit later than normal. There seemed to be large numbers of groups who had been somewhere. There is obviously a narrow window between the somewhere that people go, and avoiding the last train (we all know why we have to avoid the last train, don’t we?) A particularly aggressive porter, who had obviously been trained in Tokyo, was banging on the windows, shouting “Move down! Move down!” I hadn’t managed to get a seat, but I had managed to move to the middle of the train. I suggested to two ladies seated in front of me that they ought to take his advice, and “Move Down”. “Why would we do that?” they said. “So I can have your seat”, I said. No, they didn’t think it was funny, either. They may have thought for a moment that they were on the last train.