“My dear man, I’m of the generation wherein whereupon seeing a moving image, a screen, a monitor, mine eyes sadly are dragged to it.” Or I could have said, “Turn around.” Eh? “Just turn around.”

Instead, it was, “I’m watching the screen. I’m watching TV, big man. Look behind you.” Neutral. No wit. A veneer of blandness over a hint of madness, a short man telling a tall man that he’s a big man, but speaking more loudly than the other, using the other’s demand that you say again as an opportunity to throw the point harder. A making of the situation into something more unpleasant than it had initially been.

For a few seconds after I spoke it was like an old movie. The two older men on either side of me spoke kindly in that suck-up-to-the-man-of-the-moment way. Actually only the second one, the older one, was obsequious. “He’s out of here, looks like,” said my neighbor, though I paraphrase. But the first had said, “Not your day is it?” Which has a shade more than a shade of condescension. All this is the most anyone’s ever said to me at the Wetherspoons pub here on Queens Road, where I go occasionally yet regularly for their vegetarian English breakfast—£2.79 for two free-range eggs, two qorn sausages, a portobello mushroom, a ghostly half-tomato, baked beans and the relative rarity: hash browns, three of them. And this time, if I may crow, my tea was free as it was my 6th.

I am a tad fearful here in Britain, I am. More than in Israel. There, while it may be aggressive it’s not murderous; getting into a fistfight is not really a very socially valued thing. Here “a bit of rough” is in the language as rather a splendid thing. Looking back, I need not have reacted so violent and fearfully, as if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.

Had he not noticed there was a screen there? They’re all over the establishment. At the time I presumed he had not known why I was looking in that direction. But what if he did know and was put out merely by my looking in his general direction? In that case, what he wanted was for me to move back from the bar in order to watch the screen so that he would not be in my line of site. An outrage!

And if I had indeed been looking at him for 20 seconds or more, how could I have not seen him? Even as he was talking over to me it took me a moment to understand that he was talking to me. “It’s making me paranoid,” he concluded. I guess he was more freaked out than menacing.

Look at me, minding my own business—so much so that I’m even withdrawn from the very minor scene at the bar, watching TV instead—and in actuality I’m firing lasers at a volatile personality.

He actually did seem like a nice guy. I didn’t. We Scots, so dour. We Israelis, so edgy.