Sunday was so hideous a stormy day that night had fallen on Soho by 3pm. Soaking wet and being completely ignored by the incredibly gorgeous incredibly gay waiters in Balans, I looked up from the cold remnants of my brunch to see street lights flickering against blackened skies, and Old Compton Street completely deserted but for an increasingly large network of murky puddles; for a good long moment, this was all rather depressing.
After rousing myself from this premature bout of Sunday evening blues, and having to step outside the building without paying before a waiter noticed my existance, I puddle-dodged my way down Old Compton Street to Café Boheme, where Kate had suggested we meet for ‘lazy Sunday coffee’.
Arriving twice as drenched and windswept as was necessary, thanks to initially walking completely the wrong way and, on turning round, tripping into a foot-deep pothole in which floated a McFlurry carton and a condom wrapper, I peered through the steamed-up glass doorway and spotted tiny Kate in the far corner, half obscured by a very large glass of red wine.
I should probably have realised that Kate and I, in the six years we have known each other, have never once had ‘lazy afternoon coffee’, and in fact only ever been for ‘quite a lot of wine’. But before any willpower had the chance to be summoned, the glass door flung open and I was ushered in by a grinning Colombian man sporting a precariously angled bright-blue trilby, and pointing proudly to a large set of bongos just inside the doorway.
“You like music?!”
“Erm, yeah…” was my mumbled and slightly self-conscious response as rainwater dripped off the end of my nose.
Moments later, illuminated by candle light and sat beside Kate and two large glasses of red wine, I was ringing out the bottoms of my jeans while my still-grinning Colombian door-opener and a newly-appeared musician pal began bursting out a summery repertoire of funky bongo-lead tunes.
Within minutes, a collection of couples had taken to Café Boheme’s small floorspace - one seemingly fresh from the dance halls of South America, her a tiny Latino beauty, and he one of those rare and justifiably arrogant good-looking European men who can move effortlessly to any musical genre, and another, a v-necked-sweater-wearing (I would guess) maths teacher and his besotted lady, unrhythmically bobbing along, as unaware of the audience as they were of the beat, and generally having a lovely lovely time.
With pitch-darkness outside, flowing wine and music within, it seemed impossible that this was 4pm on a Sunday. Contrary to my fears that in this season to be jolly the weekend ends mid-Sunday afternoon, it would seem that a Soho winter means merely swapping a typically non-eventful afternoon for an extra night out; one where you can spend a good six hours enjoying red wine and live music, and still be tucked cosily up in bed by ten.
