The Royal Oak, Day of the Dead

The Royal Oak, Canon AE-1 Programe 24mm

There are few finer ways to spend a late morning than sitting in the Royal Oak on Columbia Road with a black velvet in your hand while half of East London parades past the window dressed as the recently deceased. For the uninitiated, a black velvet is Guinness topped up with champagne. It was invented, I am told, to mourn Prince Albert, which makes it the only cocktail I know of that began as an act of grief and ended up as a reason to stay for another. It tastes like a pint of stout that has been to finishing school, and it is, I would argue, a perfectly respectable breakfast if you squint a bit. Outside, the street, which on Sundays is given over to flower sellers bellowing the price of hydrangeas, had become a sort of cheerful necropolis: skeletons on stilts blinking in the autumn sunshine, a brass band in sugar-skull face paint, and a small child dressed as a marigold, gravely handing out sweets to anyone who looked sufficiently dead. At one point a man with an entirely white face and a top hat came in, ordered a coffee and a packet of pork scratchings with exquisite politeness, and left again, and nobody so much as blinked, which tells you all you need to know about Bethnal Green. I had a second black velvet, and then, in honour of Albert and the departed generally, a third, and I can report that by lunchtime I felt very much at peace with mortality, if somewhat less so with the stairs and the prospect of the afternoon…….