Plato's Cave - Friday Flash

My nose is pressed to the windows of an old haunt of mine. The Marathon, all night Greek eatery, and more germane, small hours watering hole. Merely order pitta bread with some humus and you circumnavigated the licensing laws. Or drove a bloody great bus through them in point of fact.

Such a bill of fare delivered up a motley clientele. Those dedicated drinkers keen to preserve their pleasant pub buzz. Salted olives instead of peanuts and stuffed vine leaves in place of pork scratchings. A better class of well-oiled sclerosis. Students stoking up fuel for their through-the-nighter assignments. Only for the misfit camaraderie on offer to keep them from their desks and knuckling down. Some forlorn lonely hearts eclipsed from life and a sprinkling of nocturnal lunatics, drawn by the flames licking from the rotisserie like solar flares. Me, I just went to people watch. The closest drizzled and grizzled London gets to a café society.

Every night there, was an awake surreal dream. With the faces of men melting under the atmosphere of gas-fired heat and light. We were each marked with a sheen of perspiration. Absconding beads of sweat ran down the flesh of us absconders from purposefulness, aping the grease globules dribbling along the spit meat. Under the willful striplights we conversed with visages blanched and blotchy. Mottled like the herbs sprinkled on the raw meat under glass. Each of us skewered and merely awaiting searing on life's lattice grill. Extemporisers all, we were gathered in order to be beyond time. To while away small, inconsequential hours, stretching them to ludicrous brittleness. Tempus fugit for its very life, here in the sweat-puddled well of deep stasis.

For where men are drawn together under the influence of alcohol, great mystical discussions take place, with improbable leaps of logic beyond reconstruction the bleary eyed morning after. Some men discovered God under the fluorescence. Others imagined themselves to be roasting in Lucifer's gaudily glinting Hell. Single night conversions only. Off the cuff marriage proposals were made to the few intrepid female souls who ventured along. Fights broke out, since such women inevitably came in accompanied. There has even been a murder, where the blood ran free into the drains along with the meat juices sluicing from the grill.

Folk danced, sung showtunes, even put on a striptease. A low rent "Britain's Got Talent" without the disingenuousness brought about by a TV camera, boring with future performing contract drillbit. Though I always stood with the video function poised on my phone. Fingers able to swiftly slide along to the speed dial number of a taxi firm. Lest my purpose be rumbled among these impromptu improvisers keen to retain the one night only aspect of their star turn under the stars.

Now that so many premises have all-night licensing, The Marathon has forsaken its elliptical lunar charms. Economic retrenchment means it only opens during the day, through some strange moonlit metamorphosis becoming a burger bar for the post-clubbing crowd at night. In daylight's muting of overhead garishness, the congealed grease on the tiles is clear to see. The dirt under the counterman's fingernails as he wields the tarnished long knife in his bespattered apron. The threadbare ambience unravelled, transmuted into the reek of cheap stale beer, charred meat and grease. The scratch and sniff aromatherapy of our former frivolity. Tempus started its engine once again and tapped its foot impatiently. I moved on.