Graham Reid: A pint and a few preconceptions

The Moon and Sixpence in Wardour St is much like many pubs in London these days. Whatever genuine historical features it might have once had have been air-brushed out in a sanitising make-over.

The artists, poets and musicians whose portraits are framed on the walls may, or may not, have some connection with the area, and the pub menu is almost identical to that of most others. The Moon and Sixpence is a place with the semblance of a past but little sense of presence.

You have to look long and hard for a genuine, dusty and character-filled London pub these days.

At first sight this one looked like an interesting place so that was where my son and I ended up for lunch: steak sandwiches with chips prepared by an Italian guy, and beers served by two young Scandinavians exuding an unnatural aura of health in a place where smoking seemed obligatory.

Cymon and I sat with our beers and, over the noise of a pokie machine and traffic from the street outside, swapped London stories.

He has been living there for almost a year and I had first seen the city at 18. Yet despite the chasm of decades we came to similar conclusions about the place, notably that little in London - like the pub, named for the Somerset Maugham novel - is as it first seems.

As we chatted this opinion was reinforced by two other patrons: one a well-groomed gentleman in what looked like a Burberry coat, the other a bent and dishevelled old man who chain-smoked over his plate of fried fish and drank glass after glass of Strongbow cider.

As the afternoon progressed I noticed the gentleman in the Burberry was pacing the room muttering to himself, pulling his lips back over his teeth and occasionally shaking his head violently.

Initially I had taken him for a barrister on a lunch break or Someone In The City but increasingly it was clear that he was a nutter, albeit a very well-dressed one.

And the old man who appeared to have pulled himself out from under a bridge?

In the late afternoon he pulled one of those expensive personal computers-cum-phones from his pocket, appeared to check his emails, tapped out a few messages, was met by a dapper gent in a three-piece suit who was definitely Someone In The City, and then they took their leave.

We did too - bemused again by London's consistent ability to confound expectation and upset preconceptions.

As Somerset Maugham observed, "It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic."