What with various scheduling clashes, its been a while since Grumpy and I met for our traditional Orange Wednesday film nights. Always followed or preceded by a trip to Lambland, our “favourite restaurant in the world”. A Turkish kebapci, it looks like nothing more than a cafe, but this hides some of the finest Turkish food in London. As it has been recently reviewed by the likes of Matthew Fort, and featured in Rick Stein’s ‘Food Heroes’, I am afraid I won’t mention its name here, for fear of expanding the 30 deep queues we have recently seen snaking up the alley it sits in, of a summer night.

Our film of choice this week was Francois Ozon’s 5 x 2. Unusually for me, I knew nothing about the film before seeing it, apart from that it is French. The resultant lack of preconceptions meant that I enjoyed its neat temporal switch even more than I would otherwise have done. The film shows a marriage in reverse – five extended vignettes each giving us a deeper understanding, starting with the prosaic opening scene showing the couple, Marion and Gilles, in their solicitor’s office, hearing their divorce agreement. In what seems a terribly French act, they go on to a cheap hotel for an obviously pre-arranged final act of congress. There is no love in this scene – just an aching absense of am indefinable that clearly once was there. It is a painful scene to watch, with Marion deciding half way through that she doesn’t want to go through with it, but being forced into it by her newly ex-husband.

The resonance for me, was in the way 5 x 2 forces us to confront the flaws of the couple’s love. By showing us first the desolation of the post-divorce Marion and Gilles, and then taking us back, the film asks us to look for clues – both to what went wrong, but also to what their love entailed when it was right. At their wedding there are two echoes of the divorce scene. The wedding vows are read out in the same businesslike tones of the earlier divorce scene. And when Marion, denied her conjugal rights by her husband’s passing out, goes for a walk in the grounds of the hotel they are staying in, she meets an American stranger whose brutishly physical advances she tries to reject, in a reflection of her actions with her Gilles after their divorce. As in the earlier scene, she acquiesces in the end.

Depressingly, but also very bravely, the film never shows us a relationship that is uncomplicated and painless. As it goes further back through time, we expect a respite, a lifting of the sombre tone of their divorce. I waited the whole time for a moment I could pinpoint, the moment I could say ‘that’s why they loved one another’. This moment is denied us.

The film brought to mind a poem I recently remembered – my tutor at University, who was a figure of derision to us at the time, was also a poet who had had his own little following. One of his poems examines a couple’s reunion after their divorce.

The Onion, Memory Craig Raine

Divorced, but friends again at last, we walk old ground together in bright blue uncomplicated weather. We laugh and pause to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs, prehistoric, crenelated, cast between the tractor ruts in mud.

On the green, a junior Douglas Fairbanks, swinging on the chestnut’s unlit chandelier, defies the corporation spears– a single rank around the bole, rusty with blood. Green, tacky phalluses curve up, romance A gust–the old flag blazes on its pole.

In the village bakery the pastry babies pass from milky slump to crusty cadaver, from crib to coffin–without palaver. All’s over in a flash, too silently…

Tonight the arum lilies fold back napkins monogrammed in gold, crisp and laundered fresh. Those crustaceous gladioli, on the sly, reveal the crimson flower-flesh inside their emerald armor plate. The uncooked herrings blink a tearful eye. The candles palpitate. The Oistrakhs bow and scrape in evening dress, on Emi-tape.

Outside the trees are bending over backwards to please the wind : the shining sword grass flattens on its belly. The white-thorn’s frillies offer no resistance. In the fridge, a heart-shaped jelly strives to keep a sense of balance.

I slice up the onions. You sew up a dress. This is the quiet echo–flesh– white muscle on white muscle, intimately folded skin, finished with a satin rustle. One button only to undo, sewn up with shabby thread. It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry.

Because there’s everything and nothing to be said, the clock with hands held up before its face, stammers softly on, trying to complete a phrase– while we, together and apart, repeat unfinished gestures got by heart.

And afterwards, I blunder with the washing on the line– headless torsos, faceless lovers, friends of mine.

Grumpy is here, and I have to go. I asked him to read through this post, and he (having not been to his own bed yet) felt that it was a little heavy for this time in the morning. And to compound this high-falutin’ behaviour, we are going to look at art all day – the Caravaggio and the Turks exhibitions. Crikey!

An article in this weekend’s newspaper supplements really made me think. It was about a tramp who lived in Hampstead, known to its residents and to those who run businesses there, considered by some a friend. He was known as Bronco, although it is thought his name was John. He had a passion for tea, drinking up to forty cups a day, and carrying tea making paraphernalia at all times. He died last year on Boxing Day, and a funeral was held for him a month later, attended by these friends and acquaintances, who included both local and more widely-known celebrities.

His story is interesting from two points of view. He defied the stereotypes which we generally hold of the vagrant. And, probably as a consequence of this, people’s response to him also defied the stereotypical.

At his funeral, in his obituary, and in the various pieces written about him since his death, it has been noted that he was a friend and inspiration to Peter Cook, and at various times during his life, enjoyed the acquaintance of Pierce Brosnan, the Rolling Stones, footballers Freddie Ljungberg and Thierry Henry, Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers. But from what I have read, it is clear that in none of these cases was this a patronising relationship: he wasn’t some sort of mascot. He was well read and intelligent, being known for his knowledge of history and of music. So much so that Sir Simm, who when he was UK chairman of KPMG once spent two hours talking to him on his way to the tobacconists, says ‘I know heads of major corporations less intelligent than John’. It is also claimed that he had a gift for prediction, and some of those who knew him claim he had an affinity with eastern mystics.

His passion for music led to him playing the piano in the vegetarian restaurant Pippin in the seventies, and his relationship with other restaurateurs in the area was good. The owner of Villa Bianca, Giuliano Ferrari, would feed him, not, as many kind-hearted people would do, out of the kitchen, but in the restaurant, where he was served like other customers (apparently even complaining, on occasion, about an unclean knife!). And if any of the paying customers complained about either the sight or smell of this homeless man, they would be told to move tables.

It is the seemingly endless kindness that people showed the tramp which confounds me. In a time when more and more people are ignoring the pain and suffering which has led foreigners to seek asylum in this country, a time when they cower behind misconceptions and political nonsense which allows us to condone legislation which takes away rights from suspected (supposed) terrorists, a time when people are shoring themselves up in their comfortable existences, all in order to protect their own perceived self-interest, there was a group of very wealthy, privileged, middle class people who not only stopped to speak to this man in the safe territory of the street, but took him into their own homes.

It seems that several residents took him in at various times. From Geraldine March, who gave him her keys when she went away for a month, and subsequently housed him, and his odd and difficult habits, in her front room for two years, to Giles Daubeny who allowed him to sleep on the sofa, also for a number of years, to the man who allowed him to sleep in his house, eventually causing it to wreck his marriage, these people displayed a humanity and a caring for someone on a lower strata of society, which I find surprising in Londoners.

Many of those who new him have said that they feel a loss at Bronco’s death. There has been an inevitable interest shown by his acquaintances, and the press, in his background. And the local church is unveiling a plaque to him. But to me, these details are incidental. The interest in his story, apart from an enjoyment of someone who was obviously so unusual and captivating, is how he inspired decent behaviour from the people around him, and why it is that reading about this behaviour it strikes me as unusual, rather than the norm.

It’s 4.41 am on a Sunday morning, and this is what I would like to submit to The Guardian’s ‘Notes and Queries’ column:

1. Am I alright?
2. What’s going on?
3. What you doing?
4. That’s enough questions, isn’t it?