I

IN ENGLAND old-age pensioners--OAPs-- get all kinds of benefits in addition to their rather meager pensions. During non-rush hours they can ride public transport at half-fare, every day of the week they can take free baths (with soap and one towel provided) at public bathhouses, and before four o'clock they get reduced prices at cinemas. Each pensioner gets a little card to use when he buys fuel in the winter, paying a special cut price to the government which owns all utilities.

II

At the Biograph, one of London's oldest movie houses, I used to see the OAPs in the afternoons. The usual price there is about 60 cents: for OAPs it's only 12. I suppose the Biograph was once luxurious, but now it has gone to seed, Besides amusing the OAPs it is, my roommate told me, a favorite haunt of homosexuals. He refused ever to go there even thought was only a block from where we lived in the center of London, and it showed films you couldn't see anywhere else. Mostly they were just bad--dubbed Italian epics about the rape of the Sabine women, horror creepies, or American B comedies, but sometimes there'd be a forgotten classic worth seeing.

There's a law in England--to do with fire safety I think--that required the light to be sufficient to read a newspaper by, soever though it was dark when I entered after a few minutes I could see the people around me. They'd come in the early afternoon for a good snooze after a meal in the pub around the corner, or sometimes for a bad dream. One day an old man started morning in his sleep, and a woman next to him shoved him to wake him up. Soon they were hard at it, first whispering then shouting, until a man from about ten rows back called, "Oh, shut up!"

"Shut up year self!" someone retorted,

"Who d'ye bloody think ye re?"

"Come off it, let's 'ave a bit o'peace 'ere!"

"Just you mind yer own business!"

An usher--a tired old lady who'd be and OAP herself in a few years--came over only to be shouted at, too,

"It was I'm wot started it!"

"Get off it: it was you!"

...Until finally the manager came from the box office and peace was restored. A dingy old man a few seats along form me picked up his sandwich and resumed his lunch. He had spread everything out on the seat beside him: a ham sandwich on a bit of waxed paper, a Cadbury's Crunchie, and even a napkin. But he didn't finish his sandwich before he left, and I passed it lying there on my way out.

III