Nutella

Sitting on the no 43 heading at a pace towards all the broken promises of Holloway road I was briefly deafened by a woman with too much perfume on. I looked up and she was shouting:

"NO MATE NO! CHURCH STREET...YEAH THE ONE WITH THE CHURCH ON IT"

And so the excited rant went on before she put the phone down and began to roll a cigarette. I watched the precision with which she pulled the strands of tobacco from one another before placing it on the rizla and after a few seconds returned to my book so I could continue to struggle with the rudimentary causes of the Spanish Civil War.

A few seconds later the stench of her perfume was muddled with another more homely smell, a smell that took me back to my glutinous adolescence. I looked up and she was eating a slice of brown bread piled high with nutella. It was as if she had made it there and then, because if it had been in a sandwich bag, surely all the nutella would have come of on to the cellophane?

Perhaps, I thought, she was a magician and she had conjured this wonderous snack from the remnants of her rolly.

She got off the bus at Archway, I felt nothing.