The clown is hungry. He’s not eaten since the morning, and though he cannot starve and food is joyless, he looks around for options. On the corner of the alley which loops around the back of the old cinema is a Chinese. Behind him is the Iranian restaurant and next to that, an Irish café and a chicken shop. In this beleaguered strip of city, he’s spoilt for choice with fayre from the earth’s four corners. Refugees from the empire and other satellites who bought stoves and pans when they made landfall, stocked up at a cash and carry in Park Royal and tried to replicate the recipes from home. Art on the walls that never changes, sticky floors, laminated menus in poorly written English and bare-bulbed toilets which smell of naphthalene. Food by the poor for the poor, overlooked by the moneyed cognoscenti who hole up at the Black Lion or the North London Tavern. Once, crowds came to Kilburn for the State, or the Theatre Royal, or the National. Those days are gone. Kilburn is no “must see” on any tourist trail; the only people who dine here are those who live nearby, or are passing through, hungry and far from home; the food a distress purchase to be eaten in a car or at a bus stop. The clown walks into the Iranian restaurant. Or maybe it’s Afghan. A home from home for émigrés from Central Asia and the Levant. Not that he cares. Food is fuel.

For a time, he was not the only clown in town. A troupe of Pierrots could often be seen here, their flowing white silk capes and pantaloons, pointed hats and white face paint adding glorious if fleeting theatre to the Edwardian suburb. These were professionals; performers who had studied the Commedia dell’arte and whose slapstick brought joy to music halls across the metropolis. One of their number must have lived in a flat across from the cinema and they would often retire there to drink. One hot summer night after a show at the Theatre Royal in Belsize Road, they gave an impromptu performance here on the street. “Pelissier and his Kilburn Follies”, among them Gwennie Mars, a runaway in a clown suit whose twist on music hall songs and Shakespeare plays had crowds howling for more. Mars was among the entertainers that night; her wild spirit only accentuating the deadness he felt inside. So much life and only a mortal coil in which to live it, while he had done nothing but whine, kvetch and bellyache for the centuries since his curse. She was a true clown, he an imposter who turned tricks to kill time. At the end of her routine, Mars saw him in the crowd and curtsied, and he felt blessed. He grabbed a hat from the man next to him and placed it on his own head as she watched. Lifting it, a pigeon flapped away. If nothing else, he had put in the years.

In the restaurant, a quiet man brings him small plates and naan bread. At the next table, Salim and Yasmin Ormazd sit in silence, eating skewers of minced sheep, the only other people here. The clown wonders why they came in. Were they more bored of their own four walls than they are of one another? No children to keep them busy and no conversation left, rattling around in the shell of their marriage until one of them succumbs to carcinogens and dies intubated in a shared NHS ward in Northwick Park. The clown looks down at his food. A shish kebab with a side of okra. Is this what Methuselah had to make do with day in, day out for ten centuries? Lamb and flatbread. At least he had wine which is more than the poor bastards have now in their shitforsaken desert. Named a giant bottle after the man, no doubt because he drunk himself stupid to forget. Anything to get high and escape the endless drip drip drip of a life on loop. You eat, you shit, you work every day; and every night you suck from the vine to obliterate the dread of another fucking dawn.