He was making shakshuka and Otis Redding was playing. Outside it was raining theatrically, performatively, un-Londonly in defiant refusal of the city’s politesse. Its grammar of mannerly evisceration and well-behaved alienation, intelligible to those raised to guarantee its proliferation, nebulously comprehensible to the rest. Only insofar as its sting is felt first through its delivery and second, through the assured sen...