A cup of coffee and cross words. When I was a young man working in Halas & Batchelor Studios camera department in Covent Garden. If work was in a rush we would take our filmed work to Studio Film Laboratory by noon, to be processed, so the results could be viewed at the end of the day by our film editors. One time, when I was returning from the film Laboratory, walking back on Old Compton Street I stopped at Patisserie Valerie café for a coffee. An elderly gentleman on the same table looked agitated and unhappy. It turned out his sad story was that it was his custom to have a coffee and do the crossword in the Times Newspaper everyday, but today due to a printers strike there were no Times newspaper or indeed any newspapers to be had. As you could imagine, I was enormously impressed with this gentleman for being depressed by this because this must be at the pinnacle of intellectualism. When I returned to work, I told the story to the cameraman I was working with about the crossword-ist, he responded "STUPID IDIOT”. Covent Garden to Soho & back, London, 1971
Photographer: Richard Keith Wolff
