I'm reminded of a Christmas cracker joke: Man to barber, "I'd like a haircut" and barber to man "Certainly sir; which one?"

My hair really had got a bit out of shape and unruly, etcetera, so I asked Alessandro where he has his hair cut and he told me "at Vito's", in such and such street. My two barbers had retired back in January and my hair had deliberately grown faster in the following months. I mounted my bicycle and pedaled to my favourite bar for a lockdown-takeaway cappuccino. A knot of men stood gassing to each other under one of the lime trees; lots of little dogs on leashes walked past; a police car pulled up making a street vendor roll all his wares, mainly face masks, into a bundle and sprint for safety. I stirred my cappuccino in the paper cup and noticed a woman on the bench in front of me smoking one of those electronic cigarettes which seem to produce a lot of smoke, or steam. Monet's trains in his San Lazare station paintings came to mind as I cycled off to Vito's.

I had chained my bike to a lamp post, adjusted my face mask and then knocked on the door; it opened ajar and a woman, using a tone of voice which suggested I might be a moron, informed me that it was a lady's hairdressing salon. Oooops. "Really?" I asked. "Yes" she retorted. Pointing to the barber's shop right next door she said "Go there."

Just my luck to find a hair salon and barber's shop bang next door to each other.

Vito looked like he's been let out of the old people's home for the day, doddering around in a blue overall, but the scissors in his right hand were a giveaway. When he motioned me to sit in the barber's chair I was almost tempted to quip "should I fasten my seatbelt?" but I could see we were going nowhere fast. "Long or short?" he asked and I felt his line of enquiry was a trifle private when I realized my hair was his concern. "Cut it ready for the spring" I ventured hopefully.

Conversation with Vito isn't fluid or easy as he's half, maybe two thirds, deaf. My former barber, Mario, used to tell me smutty jokes as he worked but I was sensing Vito was not of the same school. We touched briefly on football but it's not a game I particularly understand so what he said made little impact on me. "There's a lot of it" he commented and assuming we were still on football I said "Yes, rather too much." He was, however, referring to my hair which had begun to fall like grey rain around us. Forgetting he was hard of hearing I said "you'll be able to stuff a cushion with all of that" but he replied "you know he was a goalkeeper when he started out." We were, as an angry dolphin might say, totally at cross porpoises.

While we were locked-up and locked-in during Lockdown I assembled some words into a very short Ogden Nash-like poem.
"Admire us!"
Say the virus.
But I think covid
Is absolutely horrid.

Above the mirror in our lift there used to be a picture of Jesus; you might be picking your nose thinking you were alone, or admiring yourself in the mirror, but His eyes were always on you. I'd come home and tell Cristina we'd travelled up together. You and who? she'd ask; just us, Jesus and me.

Sometimes I came up in the lift with an elderly lady whose name, translated literally into English, was Mrs. Campsite. Wherever I saw her, at the fruit and veg market or barrelling along the main street (she had boundless energy) I couldn't help think of flysheets and tent pegs. She was indomitable and called me Steffie.

More often than not I take the stairs; the lift's interior is red formica and someone's taken down Jesus and I'm not really that fond of lifts anyway. I get to our landing a little breathless as we live on the 5th floor but I do enjoy the little details I notice on the way up. When we moved into this block twenty years ago the stairwell was a clearing house for gossip: the elderly would chat or shout up or down to each other, Mrs. Campsite among them, and one could hear where the cheapest apples or aubergines could be bought, who was dating whom, or who'd dared that morning to hang out their washing, still wet, on the line. These ladies have left the building - have left the planet, really - so as I climb the stairs I notice other things, and especially I notice the potted plants on the landings and can plot their sad demise as their owners inevitably overwater them. Although there aren't any of these particular plants in our stairwell, Orwell's aspidistra comes to mind from his book Keep The Aspidistra Flying where it somehow symbolized the unkillability of the middle classes in 1930s England. You can neglect an aspidistra, overtax it, starve it of water or let your cat piss in its pot and it will stubbornly live on against all odds, unfurling new leaves and staying green even in the darkest corner of the dingiest block in the East End of London. None of the plants in our stairwell can vaunt such remarkable resilience: they all succumb, in the end, after withering or wilting, to a putrid, rotten end.

We've lived here for nearly 20 years and I've seen scores of potted plants come and go. A vigorous cactus can in weeks be reduced to a quivering wreck. An impossible-to-kill rubber plant in a nice pot with healthy waxy leaves, can soon, with suitable overwatering and lack of light, keel over, wilt and wither into eternity.

On the ground floor live a young married couple whose capacity for articulate thought rivals that of a blancmange and conversation, should it ever occur, would be terse. They too have a potted plant located in the penumbra outside their front door and it is quite the saddest exhibit in the whole block: a large terra cotta pot filled with grey compost hosts a small, lost-looking cactus which meekly fights its corner. If exhibited at a contemporary art show it would be called either "Untitled" or "Futility." As people exit the lift they must see the pot, not the plant, and mistake it for an ashtray. A fortnight ago I saw a scrunched-up tissue impaled on the last two or three of the plant's remaining prickles and two days later a notice printed in black by an angry hand: "People who treat plants in this way are lousy low-life louts." The tone was accusatorial and the admonishing finger surely pointed at the family of non-European residents who live, as we all know, on the 3rd floor.

If anyone's wondering . . . it wasn't me.