Tuesday 25th February 2020

After the Gays at the Florida wedding, the second incident was at the Lennox Square Shopping Mall in Atlanta which to reach required a journey on the Marta through woods to what appeared to be another city. A man was getting a bit too friendly, I thought. He was from Mexico and wanted to help me find the exit from the Lennox Square Shopping Mall. I’d developed a craving for a chocolate slack from Club Monaco plus a jumper in tangerine from the same. I was plotting to acquire them online. In the end they were shipped from North Carolina. ‘I really like your coat,’ he said. ‘It’s only a Zara,’ I said but he’d never heard of Zara. Outside the Marta station we were joined by a pair selling telephone services. ‘I live in UK,’ I said. They grasped that that meant I wouldn’t be interested in their telephone service but they really liked my coat. Fortunately the Mexican announced that he was headed for his rooming house or whatever, having admired my coat.

I was a bit wracked shopping in Atlanta. I ought to have been in the Civil Rights Museum and at the Martin Luther King centre. I almost wasn’t at the Civil Rights Museum but finally, on the last day, I was. A black woman approached me,  surely for a telling off. How could a white person understand?  I thought she was going to say but she said, ‘I really like your style.’ It was the same Zara coat. That evening, at the airport, boarding for London there was a queue and disagreeableness until, that is, one of the guards said, ‘I really like your style.’

Zara – if only they knew…