His Name’s Dave.

I didn’t know his age. I didn’t know where he was born. London or the Estuary, to judge by his accent. A back of the throat rasp, with that peculiar, drawling fullness that you sometimes find in Estuary accents. A sudden hiccup of vowels, shooting up from the Albert Dock before slipping back into the rasp. He was in his early forties, back in 2014. That would have put him in his late forties now. eight, nine winters later. When I was a teenager, I stayed in East London from time to time, in the holidays and when I got a weekend away from school. I’d get the train from Godalming to Waterloo, then either walk East or get the Tube, getting off at Tower Hill and walking the rest of the way. Dave had two pitches- one in a pedestrian underpass up by the North-East corner of the Tower, and one in the Northern stairwell to Tower Bridge. I never worked out which one he chose to occupy on a particular day — I don’t know if he had a system, but whichever route I took to Tower Hill brought me past him. The last time I passed him regularly, he was mostly in the stairwell. <a href="https://lewis-sinclair.medium.com/his-names-dave-0c4be9b481ca">Website</a>