I stayed in Bayswater, London, last year. This acrylic is the view from a local bar looking towards Main Sreet, Queensway that is. I have returned from exploring the area of white Victorian terraces and dinky squares. Farther on, I spent much of the evening on Portobello Road known for its street market. I had never walked it before, though it had long fascinated me. It was a central feature of Martin Amis’s 1989 novel London Fields, in particular a pub called the Black Cross. There, Nicola Six, Keith Talent and Guy Clinch would meet and Nicola, the Murderee, set the macabre menage a trois (a quatre?) in train. Narrated by doomed author Sam Young and set in late 1999, it is a comedy tinged with foreboding. The end of the world, the end of love.

The Black Cross is a fictional bar, of course, so I made do with convivial reality. Portobello Road is at the pleasant end of culture clash. Cosy, quaint, common and sophisticated, like much of London’s inner patchwork, it is village and urban combined. Back in Bayswater, I find a bar invitingly empty. It is that dread hour: closing time. There are, as always, plenty of stories set to continue into the night. Not quite the Folies Bergere, more Edward Hopper meets Rock Dreams.

The Stranger Song is appropriate, given that the bar advertises poker nights on Monday and Wednesday. The 1955 film noir The Man with the Golden Arm starring Frank Sinatra was an inspiration. The song is one of the Songs of Leonard Cohen, his debut album from 1967. Cohen’s Golden Voice seduces the listener. No better man than Leonard for the chat up line, but here it is developed into an invitation. We are all strangers, our paths intersecting in those almost arbitrary places, hotels, bars and train stations.

You hate to watch another tired man lay down his hand

Like he was giving  up the holy game of poker

And while he talks his dreams to sleep, you notice there’s a highway

That is curling up like smoke above his shoulder