Just waiting for their chips and their pie

There's nothing like the situation of waiting for someone. On the street, in a pub, a station platform, somewhere busy. An excuse to loiter and watch it all go by, the people, the traffic, and occasionally the traffic in people. Of course one can mooch about for a bit anyhow, but after a while I would get self-conscious. For this to work, to get right into it, it has to be the real thing. You might think that occasionally scanning the crowd for one's approaching companion / consort / connection would be a distraction, but apparently not. That's your standing ticket, your loitering licence.

Getting nicely plotted up is more than half the trick. What you want is a window seat, or near the bar, or on a corner, under cover, close to the flow but with a bit of architecture either side of you to keep the bodies from bumping you. Have a think about this before you fix the rendezvous. Some of the best spots already have uses. If you're not buying or selling cracksmackpaddywhack people will wonder why you're sticky about the top of Charing Cross Road by the furthest tube exit - and those people will have an urgent reason for wondering why.

A chamfered corner is useful, giving that crossroads location without thrusting you into the path of the populace. Standing on the steps of a building, so long as one is not impending ingress and egress to the relevant edifice, works a treat since you have elevation into the bargain. Another trick for getting a bit of space around you is to stand directly beside one of those vagrants who sleep at right angles to the brickwork. Or adjacent to a freshly shot or stabbed teenager - no-one wants blood on their Blahniks or Churches.

After a while you'll get to read the street, its characteristics and rhythms. The ebb and flow of the bus stops, the steady stream into the tube station and intermittent gushings out, shuddering cinema queues and the pink provincial mobs outside the theatres. Taxis flagged down, amber gambled, figures bolting through the vehicles. The people, beginning or ending their evenings, the lovers, the adulterers, the escorts and the escorted, the couples, the singles. If the truth could be told to you, of all those passing, most of it would bore you arseless, but in among them you know a few are there doing something Else, New. Have to be, it's in the numbers.

If you do it right, get it, you won't want him or her or them to turn up, not just yet, not until you're good and cold or wet, and really need that drink and the Vietnamese from the new place. You might almost want to skip before they arrive, and find another corner. But you don't and it's usually just enough.