I crossed twin men at a Chinese takeaway.
They were well-dressed in slate grey jackets and open-necked white shirts.
They were identical in every way from the stray grey hairs on top of their thin heads to the scuffed black soles under their thick shoes. They even carried identical white plastic bags filled with the same tin foil containers poking out at the corner.
Except there was one difference. While they both had well-groomed Van Dyke beards, the one on the left had a longer, whiter tip.
Nevertheless they both seemed jovial. Their open-mouthed smiles lasted so long on their faces that it seemed to me a little suspicious. Then again they were brothers bringing home dinner on a Sunday night.
And it was a big night. Though I couldn't remember why.
I watched them go. Another difference: the one on the left had a small but growing bald spot.
While the white in the beard was explainable, I wondered how one twin could have such vastly different hair patterns to the other.
Maybe they weren't twins, maybe one was simply dressed up as the other, an uncanny resemblance. Maybe they weren't even brothers.
No, I thought. They were brothers. It just made sense.
And the place they had come from, the takeaway, what was that? I had never seen it before. The name was lost in Chinese characters.
For a moment I thought about going inside but something stopped me. It was a big night, for everyone, It would almost certainly be busy without a gormless browser dawdling in too.
So I carried on home. With every step, I slowly convinced myself of how tired the one on the left had looked compared to the right.
Yes, he was a little more bent over. Yes, he did seem to drag his feet.
Yes, that smile was probably the first to fade.
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