I am at Shanghai airport waiting to board the plane that will take me back to London when I notice an European guy staring at me incessantly, I pretend not to notice, but out of the corner of my eye I keep checking to see if he has stopped, No, he is still there staring at me, in cases like this, the possibilities are endless, has he fallen in love? Does he know me? Is he a bit crazy? Does he want to ask me something? Who knows, but I’m not in the mood to find out, there’s no need because he breaks the ice, He calls me over and asks if we’ve met somewhere before, he thinks he’s spoken to me before but can’t remember where, I have no idea, but looking at him, I realise his face is familiar, he looks like someone I exchanged glances with while visiting an ancient Chinese palace, I ask him if that’s when he says he spoke to me, but it’s not, so where? I ask him where he lives and he says London, I start to think about it and realise that I probably made him a coffee somewhere or he’s a friend of friends, I try to figure it out and ask him which is his favourite coffee shop, he replies that when he lived in Islington, he used to go to Devotion Coffee… Bingo! I often work in that place, so we definitely met there.

I try to remember the dynamics and I vaguely remember how it happened, I was serving customers and among them was a Japanese man, we started talking in Japanese and he joined in the conversation, surprising everyone, he had taught English in Japan and that was where he had learned the language. …. anextraordinaryandordinarylife…