Graham is a prolific street artist and sober businessman rolled into a frown with a spatula. He stoically runs the Giggly Pig Co.’s stall at the Hampstead Heath farmer’s market between 10am and 2pm every Saturday. He’d paint and tax for longer if they’d let him.

The 15th of November marks my 27th encounter with Graham, but I doubt his boarish eyes even recognise me, he enters another world when he’s in command of the ancient griddle that answers only to he.
Graham is grey, stocky and feels like he was born already an adult in the late ‘60s. He wears the same pair of Adidas Originals trackies as me, only his are actually originals. He’s one of those blokes that no matter how big you’re feeling, you yearn for the respect of.
On my approach I pause my headphones, just in case he hears I’m listening to One Direction and refuses to serve me. He couldn’t argue with their quality, but he could with their clobber and clueless stance on processed meat.

I’m second in the queue and arrive in time to see the tweed jacket in front of me receive just two rashers of bacon. I fear Graham will pork me off the same way, just like Peggy does when she covers for him during August.
I tremble, “Same, please. No onions.”
Three thick cuts of pork bellyflop into a congealed pool of oil and I exhale, pleased Graham and I have wordlessly found common ground as the only men in this dual-purpose playground not wearing chinos.
The five of us sizzle in silence against the soothing backdrop of a nearby customer and vendor arguing over whether cheese can be frozen. They pine for the collegiate relationship Graham and I have under his black canvas, pink-lettered gazebo.

As Graham scrapes the griddle for his first flip, the overcast sky springs an autumn surprise and casts me in shadow.
I turn to inspect the nimbostratus but find a brick shithouse of a woman looming over me, covered head to toe in pink Under Armour. With her bright blonde hair, she looks like a battering ram made from Battenburg. I think I recognise her from a viral video of a woman throwing slender men onto moving horses but then I realise she has green eyes, not blue.
My mind quickly reaches an unpleasant conclusion.
“Mate, you’re about to lose top spot with Graham”, it says.
And it’s right. She’s not in chinos either, plus she brings more of what Graham values most in this playground – the capacity to inhale red meat.

As I feared, she orders four bacon rolls. Two with onions, two without. Strange to not have a single preference, but I guess four courses demands variety.
Graham blushes as red as the ketchup bottle beside him. He stutters, “C-c-card or cash?”.
At his affront, I go lightheaded. But I still clock his eyes dart to the ketchup bottle, as he wonders if he’ll need to administer its sugars to steady me. I often watch the clip from the Prisoner of Azkaban where Professor Lupin gives Harry chocolate to calm him after facing a dementor, and fantasise that it’s Graham and me. Small consolation, but at least now I can replace the dementor with a female bodybuilder and fix a plot hole.
I latch onto the nearest post of the canopy to compose myself. Graham lodges my bacon bap into my palms which allows me to settle my centre of gravity.
He goes back to gushing over the woman, mocking me by telling her the Cumberland sausages are two packs for £6, but he can do three for £8 for her.

As I squeeze my final bite past the lump in my throat, I notice a svelte man in riding boots and two young children, a boy and a girl, approach. The boy is also in riding boots and the girl has a pink Under Armour tracksuit and hair matching the blonde dementor currently sucking my soul.
The woman greets the three of them by simultaneously bear hugging the man and boy off the ground and meeting the girl with the same overhand handshake professional footballers use.

I smirk as I reply to my mind, with an imaginary slow clap, “Two with onions, two without…”

Graham’s cheeks revert to grey and he hands over her quadbap. He waits until the fraud and her family are gone, then he giggles a coquettish giggle at his naïveté.
He turns to find me scratching my back against the post, happier than Baloo singing The Bare Necessities, and says, “Would you like a chocolate frog?”