City Lunch

'The City' is now the collective term for the financial district of London – roughly equivalent to 'Wall Street' in New York. It is called such because it's the original centre of the City of London, back when it had a wall and everything; the centre of gravity has shifted westwards over the centuries, and the City now is almost on the eastern end of 'Central' London. I haven't explored it much, in part because there just aren't any particular attractions there for me the way there are elsewhere, but a good friend who knows a lot more about London invited me for an audio tour of the original coffee shops of the City and I don't turn down an invitation like that.

We started our tour with half-pints at a pub quite near the first coffee shop, in a warren of little alleyways with many other pubs, crawling with financiers (not the pastry kind). The 'City Boy' is the prototypical privileged bourgeois who went to a good school, graduated into a high-paying job, makes more money than he knows what to do with, and all that that implies. There were a couple of them eating lunch on a barrel outside the pub opposite, and I tried to sketch the one wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, because the setting and action contrasted with the sharp suit he was wearing, but it came out looking like he's just done a line of coke. Given the City's reputation it's not entirely implausible, but that's not the situation, I promise ...