Walking up St Mary Road, an elderly couple tightly linking arms approach. I step aside to let them past. They avert their eyes, lock together tighter, hurry past. They look scared. I continue. There are more elderly couples, all linked tight, all looking scared.

I turn down East Avenue. The scaffolding for the renovation on the corner obscures the sign for the street and it looks like EAT AVE UE. I come to a crossing and the main sources of light come from inside the cars crossing my path. The cars contain more scared, elderly couples.

As I round the next corner I catch a look in the windows of the Queen’s Arms. The lights are low and the diner’s chins are lit with the table lights’ glow like sunlight off the moon. Immediately in front of me in the window is an obese couple sitting opposite each other. I cannot tell the gender of the person facing me but they have their napkin tucked into their collar and it is billowing out magnificently, accentuating my freeze-frame image of a morsel on a fork on its way into a surprisingly small-looking mouth, but to me somehow the billowing napkin looks like an extension of the mouth, reminiscent of a flytrap.