About a Boy | Charterhouse Street, Smithfield — one perfect thing for one person

Shopping, in Will's accounting, is not a chore but a way to spend units. The film sends him out for single-portion luxuries at Comptoir Gascon, the small French deli that traded at 63 Charterhouse Street, facing Smithfield. The shop has since closed. The street has barely moved.

Charterhouse Street runs along the northern flank of London's meat market, where animals have been bought and sold on and off since the twelfth century and Horace Jones's iron-and-glass halls have stood since the 1860s. Opposite the old deli site sits the Central Cold Storage building, a slab of dark faience raised for the unglamorous job of keeping carcasses cold. The real trade here happens between roughly two and eight in the morning. By the hour Will is awake, the porters have gone and the pavement belongs to office workers queuing for coffee.

The film never says any of this out loud, which is why it works. A man who buys one duck breast and one bottle of good wine, for himself, in the shadow of a market built to move meat by the tonne — that is the whole character in a single frame. Come at seven on a weekday and you get both Londons at once: the last men in white coats hosing down, and the first of the men shopping for a dinner party of one.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.