Eccentrics.

 ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’.  ~Mark Twain

I have described London more often than I can remember and have never felt that I got the city, or its people, right-it is, I think the most unfathomable of them all. 

I was sitting in a coffee shop waiting for a client when a tall elegant man in ‘high middle age’ walked stiffly in and ordered a cup of coffee.  He wore a hat tilted over his brow.  He looked as if he had enjoyed perhaps rather too good a dinner the night before, and he emanated an air of unconcerned, if not actually oblivious, composure.  I put him down for mildly eccentric and thought to myself that only in London could one still see such a genial figure, at once so urbane and so well, well-used, more or less direct from the eighteenth century.

When the man walked out he stopped at my table, tipped his hat, smiled, and left.

‘Know who that was?’ asked the proprietor.  ‘Of course’, I replied, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.  

safe 4^th 0✗0✗ツ

---