We Went for a Walk and Stumbled on Street Musicians: How One Chance Evening Beat Any Holiday

It began, as these things rarely do, with a shortage of milk. It was a Thursday in early autumn, around half past six, and the shop was ten minutes' walk away. We took the long way along the Thames because the light was good and neither of us could face going straight back to the laundry.

Going out for milk

We heard it before we saw it: a double bass, walking slowly up and down somewhere ahead of us, near Tower Bridge. You feel a double bass in the ribs before you hear it properly, and it pulled us along the river path past the commuters and the people photographing the bridge.

There were a few of them, set up on the riverside with the towers of the bridge behind them, playing with their eyes half shut. A bass, a saxophone, not much in the way of amplification. An open case for coins. About twenty people had already stopped, in the way people do when they have not quite decided to stop, standing slightly sideways, as if they might leave at any moment.

We stood sideways too. Then the saxophone took a long, lazy solo over something I half knew, and we found a bit of wall and sat down.

There was a small girl dancing with enormous seriousness. There was a man in a suit with a carrier bag, who had clearly missed at least two trains and looked happy about it. A couple asked us to take their photograph and then stayed talking for half an hour, about Glasgow, for reasons I cannot now recall. The sky went pink and then that deep London blue, the lights on the bridge came on and a boat went past with everyone on it waving, for no reason, at everyone on the shore.

We had a five-pound note between us. It went in the case. We would have paid five times that for a ticket and thought it a bargain.

We had gone out for milk. We came home two hours later, without the milk, feeling as if we had been away for a week.

Why it beat the holiday

We had been away that spring: a proper week, booked for months, with a spreadsheet. It was very nice. I could not tell you much about it now, and I can tell you nearly everything about that wall by the river.

I have a theory about this. A booked evening arrives with a job to do. It has cost money, so it must be good, and you spend part of it checking whether it is. An evening nobody planned owes you nothing, so anything good about it comes as pure profit. There is also the small thrill of being in the right place by accident, and you can't buy that, though plenty of people will try to sell it to you.

How to leave room for chance

You can't schedule luck, but you can stop scheduling everything else. This is what we do now, at home and away:

• Keep one evening empty. One a week at home, and one in every trip. Don't fill it because you feel you should.
• Walk towards water or a square around dusk. Musicians go where the people are. In London, try the South Bank between Westminster Bridge and Tower Bridge, Potters Fields or the piazza at Covent Garden. Elsewhere, try the Abbey Churchyard in Bath or the miradouros of Lisbon at sunset.
• Invent a small errand. Milk works well. It gets you out of the door without any pressure for the evening to amount to anything.
• Leave the headphones at home. You will not hear the bass otherwise. Save the walking playlist for another day.
• Apply the twenty-minute rule. If something makes you slow down, give it twenty minutes. Most of the time you can tell by then, and you have lost nothing if you can't.
• Carry a few coins or a note. If you stay for more than a song, pay something. A couple of pounds is fair, and some players now take cards too.
• Take one photo, then put the phone away. You will want the memory more than the footage.

The milk, in the end

We bought it the next morning. We have been back to that stretch of river a few times since and the band has not been there, which seems about right. There have been other things: a choir warming up, a man with a very old accordion, once just a good sunset and a long conversation about nothing.

If you want more of this sort of thing, walking a city without a plan works on the same principle, and so does a Sunday kept just for yourself. Neither requires any booking. Both may, on a good day, cost you a pint of milk.