Characters and Caricatures

Yesterday I was in Bristol in one of my favoured coffee houses having a chocy-coffee thingy and people watching and I could have kicked myself as when I reached into my bag I had my little note pad aggrandised by the title 'writers journal' but no blinking pen. And there before me was a group of people who just had to be captured. I mean, they were so individual and quirky that they were more caricatures than characters and I wanted them.

However, no could do! You can't exactly ask the group you're hoping to immortalise if they happen to have a pen or pencil about their persons. Well perhaps they did. Perhaps they're the sort of people who inspire so many budding writers, or caricaturists for that matter, that they go prepared. Not only are they aware that they are a gift but they succumb to the obvious accolade by being prepared and assenting to the homage done to them by proffering a pen or pencil with humble compassion for the lack of preparedness of the rest of the world. Yup, I can see that happening.

So what did I do? Nothing. I just scrutinised the group and conjectured about the sort of people they actually were while the person who was sharing my table with shook his head with a bemused look on his face.

Some years ago, before I had any excuse as I wasn't taking a creative writing course, I was in a pub - also in Bristol so perhaps there's some sort of convention for interesting types there that I'm unaware of - and I happened to see a chap with an interesting jewelled eye patch. He was in The Bristol Flyer which has a number of seating areas on different levels and he was ensconced in a particularly roomy, comfy armchair reading the newspaper. He was interesting in himself but while I watched he glanced around the room and then shifted the patch from one eye to the other and nonchalantly carried on reading.

I was enthralled. So I decided to get a little closer and see if I could film him on my mobile, so I walked away from my friends, mobile primed, and semi-hid behind a column near him, filming. Yes, how weird would that have looked to anyone else in the pub? I didn't get my footage, or even a quick shot as one of the less inebriated amongst the party I should have been with spotted what I was up to and walked me back to the table - somewhat sternly I might add.

This traumatic experience led me to not film or photograph the coffee house group, mainly because the pub bloke actually winked at me when I left and the thought of a whole group winking was a bit creepy - but I should have, I really should have cos these characters had slipped from being mere characters into the realms of caricatures and deserved me not to be quite so reserved.

Does this image indicate that I will never become a writer of any worth I wonder. No pen, no balls and no concrete evidence that the wonderful world of Bristol holds people who blast the boring, nondescript types out of the water!