Springtime in Soho

(by Thomas McColl)

Anyone walking through Soho in winter cannot miss that, even in a telephone box that’s dark and dank and stinks of piss, it’s somehow always spring.

All year round, each day of the week, lust germinates and flowers into blooms: flimsy pieces of card, with blu-tack roots, so weak they never last much more than a couple of hours.

The prospects for survival of this species would be bleak if it wasn’t for all the hovering men.

Just off Brewer Street, inside a telephone box cocoon, a man’s already mutated into something that his wife would never recognise: a strange hybrid creature, with a human face but a pair of bulging compound eyes…

…a husband, driven no longer by mutual love and respect but by the single-mindedness of an insect.

And, all over Soho, the same thing’s happening too to scores of other men, ensuring that tomorrow it will start all over again…