Weight loss

Just as you always hope will happen, I knew I had met the man of my dreams almost on sight. I had made a booking the day before. I arrived. Burak was just finishing the previous customer and gestured with a comb towards an armchair. A Turkish coffee was brought. The customer paid and left and I took his place in the chair before the mirror. ‘Now, sir,’ Burak said, with an ingratiating formality not quite his own. ‘What can I…’ But as he was asking about the haircut, the nervous pale English boy at the next station in the barber’s interrupted. ‘Er, Burak,’ he said, tremulously. ‘I wonder, er,

It was a few months ago. I was coming back from my morning walk with Greta in Battersea Park, so it can only have been half past ten in the morning. A familiar neighbourhood figure zigzagged recklessly across the road towards us. He had something like a sense of purpose about him. Telling a stranger that his avoirdupois could give G.K. Chesterton a run for his money counts as a hate crime ‘Have you got –’ he paused and reckoned – ‘£5? To get something to eat?’ Five pounds seemed an ambitious amount. I thought I’d answer the implied request and not the question he’d actually asked. ‘I’m not going