I have this curse: If I want to take someone somewhere nice to eat, it will ALWAYS end up being crap. Always. So we were in
Portobello Road and I remembered
Portobello Gold, a cool
Pub/
Restaurant/
Oyster Bar where a friend used to work. It was always good and busy, but not crowded. And we were hungry enough to eat anything. So we went. It was jammed. It was smokey (suprisingly for
London, eh?).
I asked the Australian barman if they had any menus. You know what he said to me? "Know any restaurants that don't?". Punk. And they had one vegetarian thing on the menu. One. So I had resigned myself to the fact that it was all going to suck until we left. Until a mysterious force pulled me towards the bathroom. Next thing I am face to face with the most famous mole in the world. The mole of which I speak is, of course, a rock legend in itself. This mole was pickled in whiskey. That mole was growing on the face of Lemmy.
He was casually propping up the corner of the bar where you would expect a rednosed pub victim to be. Rock legends don't prop up the corners of bars. I visibly staggered as I realised that light carrying my likeness had fallen upon the cornea of God. Then I sidled past him into the bathroom. I sent my girlfriend to the bathroom afterwards to see if she would recognise the three-moled Cerberus guarding the bathrooms, but she didn't. How anyone can NOT recognise Lemmy is beyond me.
He was hanging out with 2 other people: A girl of about 30 wearing a denim jacket with a Clash patch on the back, whom I think was Debi Mazar (Sandy in Goodfellas). The third was a middle aged Dad-looking guy, who I think might have been Nick Mason from Pink Floyd. Maybe.
Lemmy was drinking whiskey, of course. He was laughing at the Dad-looking guy, who was laughing at all the people in the pub who did double takes as they realised who Lemmy was. I considered sending him a whiskey, but then I thought that I would do the coolest, most punk rock thing ever: I walked out of the Portobello Gold without bugging the legend in the corner.