04/05/2026
The Closest you can get to Lasagne at Waterloo

I am currently on a bus across London to visit some friends. We’ll be having lasagne for dinner, which feels like the culinary equivalent of a warm hug that says ‘everything is great’.

Sometimes high-speed feels like life's default setting. It seeps between the pages of the day, bleeding into the whole book of London life: getting across the city as quickly as possible, replying to all the emails, conquering the laundry in a single morning. There's rarely time to focus on one thing because of the city's motion blur. Ultimately, this pace binds the days together like too much glue, making it hard to know what happened when, or to stop and read the individual pages of day-to-day life. Candidly, illustration doesn’t lend itself to this mentality. It is time-consuming; it requires revision and uncertainty. It takes time to be considerate, to build up the layers.

Opposite me, There's a woman reading a book, it looks like she's just started, but is smiling, so I feel excited for the new journey she's embarking on. There’s an older man waiting to get off the bus, wearing a pin-striped suit. As he disembarks, the stripes on his trousers ripple mesmerisingly. When I arrive at Waterloo station, there’s pigeons inside, there’s two friends wrapped in each other's embrace, one greeting the other off a train. Their faces are illuminated but their eyes are closed, focussed on feeling every millimetre of human contact. Their joy feels infectious, and I wish I could capture it.

Pat Thomas

Pat Thomas