Whitechapel Library

That’s sad - it was quite a place. Full of the strangest people. There used to be a bloke who drank in the White Hart. He was big and fat. He used to sit in the corner shouting sotto voce fuck fuck you f’ing cunt in a menacing, and completely mad way, and punching the palms of his hands. When he went to the bar he would ask, extremely meekly and politely, in a very high voice for a pint of the cheapest bitter. (Which he did very many times a day). I was most surprised to find him in the Whitechapel library borrowing stacks of books on the Russian Revolution…