Sunday nights find me unbearble, as a rule. Always have. I’m twitchy, short-tempered and frustrated. It’s just an extended version of the symptoms of the viral I-Don’t-Want-To-Go-To-Schoolitis that has plagued me all my life.

Tonight I am even worse than usual. Not only did I lose a day of my weekend to some abortive project (NB: Not as in ‘the carrying out of backstreet abortions’, I am looking to increase my freelance job things, but I am not looking to become Dame Vera Lynn from that Mike Leigh film a couple of years ago) but also I have a secondary disease, caused by the phases of the moon and pull of the tides. Yes. I am suffering from the periods.

No! Don’t go, boys! I’m not going to get all TMI-ish about the PMTs, it’s not going to be all ’scented swabs and sanitary plugging devices’ - well, not apart from that bit, which was; I’m really just talking about the pre-periods.

Some people get grumpy, short-tempered, unpleasant to be around but not me. Or not any more than usual, anyway. Not so it’s noticeable.

What is noticeable is the tears. And the food. Weeping and eating. That’s me, pre-blood-letting.

Weep weep weep. Eat eat eat.

I do stop weeping occasionally. But mainly so I can concentrate on eating.

Today I have cried at:

* How nice my eggs benedict had been in the cafe around the corner.
* A moment on a television programme where a couple turned out not to be able to buy the house they quite liked.
* The fact we will never be able to buy a house ever ever ever.
* Burning my toast.
* A jam stain on my whitest vest.
* The fact that my beloved was giggling sneakily every time I burst into tears.
* An advert where someone did something nice for someone else.
* The fact that I want a desk.
* Misery at having run out of things to eat.
* Joy at discovering more carb-laden crapgoodies in the freezer. (I think they’d been there about a month, though how they survived the last time, I have no idea).
* The point in a crime drama when someone had to tell someone else that their husband was dead.
* The fact that my beloved might die one day, and that I was hungry.
* How much I like parma ham.
* Some stupid thing that happened which, when it happened, was fine, but today? BEEEG disaster, suddenly.
* Losing my chewing gum.

And those, folks, are just the highlights.

Oh, and in other news (since this blog is almost 6 years old in the next few days, what better time to mention it), in a somewhat unexpected and borderline-miraculous turn of events, I’ve managed to flunk-of-luck my way into quite a nice little lucrative deal where…
Sorry, I’m managing not to say it once more.

Thing is: Next month I’m going freelance. Becoming a full-time writer for a living.
And in many ways, in roundabout or direct ways, it’s all because of this blog. So thank you. Anyway. that’s it. I’ll explain more tomorrow.

Oh bother, now I’m crying again.

Another couple of things in the mounting list of things that people don’t know about me

I am very bad at negotiating. When I say ‘bad’, I do mean ‘cataclysmicallybad-bad’.

Things I have been known to do during important career negotiations
(At Some Point In The Past Not Neccessarily Now, People)

1) Burst into tears.
2) Made inappropriate jokes about my negotiatee being a bit like my mother.
3) Accepted he first random sum offered to me.
4) Managed to talk my way out of a job.
5) Hyperventilated.
6) Cried.
7) Constructed sentences entirely made out of the words ‘um’ and ‘I-I-I’ and ‘the thing is’ used around 249 times each in various combinations.
8) Spent minutes staring into space.
9) Apologised more than a thousand times.
10) Had a bit of a sad.

You’ll notice that bursting into tears appears several times in the list: I just don’t want you to underestimate how often it happens. Pretty much every. single. time.

_______________________

You know what? Let’s leave all that for now. I was going to tell you something, but I’ll tell you next week instead.

In the meantime….

I was surfing the interwebnet and happened upon these little beauties. This one, for children comes with free toilet roll holder and hopefully some vouchers for therapy in later life. And frankly this is just irresponsible. Completely and utterly incomprehensible.

_____________________

Just like me, in fact, this week.

Bibble bibble bibble bibble.

Things people might not know about me, number one in an unyet undecided but surely going SOMEWHERE series of things:

I have a mole in my armpit.

I’m very fond of it as, frankly, I tend to think it’s as close to being Marilyn Monroe as I’m ever going to get. So I tend to look at it and feel affectionate, as she had a terribly attractive mole that *everybody* could see, and I have this lovely little mole that *I* can see, and thus we are terribly similar.

And then I remember it’s a flap of brown flup.
In my armpit.

And I stop showing it off.

Usually, at drunken stressful networking occasions, this is about 12 people too late.

So not many people know this, apart from those 12 people (x however many drunken networking occasions)

um…

__________________________

On a slightly related note, I have noticed a lot of adverts around for creams promising to fight off the sun’s bad effects. They say that they will stop the nasty wrinkles, and stop the nasty ‘brown spots’, because no one wants the nasty ‘brown spots’ caused by the sun.
It took me several times of the advert sailing past me to realise…
Did they mean freckles?
Is the beauty industry demonising freckles?!

Things people might not know about me, another post in an unyet undecided series of things:

Until about three weeks ago I’d never seen an episode of Seindfeld all the way through.
People went on an on and on about bloody Seinfeld, and I just had to nod, and smile, and pull pop-culture nuggets out of my collective-generational-memory-hat.

But then someone heard this, and couldn’t understand what I was saying to them when I explained the fact I had never seen a full episode, and immediately brought seven damn series of the thing to me and told me I was going to watch them.

So now I am half way through series four, and although I may not mind if I never hear the twang of an early-nineties bass riff ever again, I am enjoying the glut of information that such an exercise brings.
Also, it’s quite funny. In parts.
I knew it had me when, half way through one episode, I turned to my beloved and said “You know, I’m a bit Elaine, and I’m a bit George, but I’m never Jerry.”

Then I knew.

Next on my list of things I’ve never seen a whole episode of to burrow all the way through in one?
I don’t know, maybe the Sopranos. (And yes, I do know what happens at the end, thanks)
Perhaps I should try and track down Heroes.
Hell, maybe I should be more patriotic, and track Hollyoaks from the first series.

Then again, I do have books….

Things people might not know about me, number one in an unyet undecided series of things:

I’m an incredibly dramatic typist - something I have to fight to repress when working in train carriages or cafes.
It’s not just the pulling of faces relevant to the tone of whatever I’m writing (though I do that too, very much. Comically much), it’s that I lose words: big crucial, important words, without which the sentence simply won’t be right. I’m very picky about each word being exactly right, so it’s unbearably frustrating when I lose them.

And when I do lose them, I have a tendency to make little motions with my hands to try and retrieve them. This is a fine thing to do if you generally have bluebottles circling your head, but as I don’t - and I like to think that ‘not smelling of poo’ plays not a small part in this - it tends to look just a little bit crazy.

The problem is that I know exactly the word I want - it’s the only word that will do, in the circumstances - and I have a reasonable vocabulary, and the word is IN there, and if there’s anyone with me, I can describe its exact meaning, and contextual usage, but just not IT. Rather more annoyingly, my brain starts playing with it, in a very visual way, and then it gets stuck, and… No, I’m not explaining very well.

An example: Last year when we’d just moved to Brighton and I was trying to work out how to do writing easily on the train, I borrowed a handheld device that my useful Beloved had kicking about the house for testing purposes. I talked about it on my blog, and on here, called it a ‘flan’, which confused a lot of people.

Because of course it wasn’t called a flan, that would be stupid. It was a ‘palm’, but time after time, trying to put my finger on THAT word I came up with the word ‘flan’ instead. It has the same number of letters, slightly rearranged, and a ‘p’ looks very much like an ‘f’, and and ‘n” like an ‘m’, really, so once I had this image in my brain, it was very difficult to shift and replace it with another.

I think my problem is that words are very physical, solid, visual, tactile things, and thus difficult to shift just because they happen have completely the wrong meaning (through no fault of their own, poor things). Not one to hold this against them, in conversation with My Beloved I’ll more often use the first word rather than the right one, so ladders get introduced into conversation about the rain, or forks make a sudden appearance in a political discussion. It’s something he’s had to get used to. I try harder with other people.

And when you’re writing things, of course, you can’t use amoeba rather than albino, because people would quite fairly get offended. And so … um … I’ve forgotten what my point was.

Yes. Dramatic typist. Um. I’m building up to something, I swear.

See, I have been thinking more about this idea of people being annoying on trains - thinking about it, mainly, because I continue to be plagued with them. On my way into work yesterday morning (yes, it was Saturday, boooo), for example: A lady whose normal light-conversation-voice was the same voice that the rest of us reserve for impassioned arguments with soon to be ex-spouses, and next to me, a priest with alarmingly pungent body odour.

So I concerned myself, as usual, with my new Brilliant Idea.

When I lived in Scotland a few years ago, there was a column called ‘I Saw You’. People who had seen someone else (you see? that’s where they got the name from) that they found attractive would put a note in a little box in various places in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their note might appear in the next week’s edition

“You were wearing a green jumper and were on the no.86 bus, I smiled at you, and you blinked. Drink sometime?”

“Me: glasses and a shaved head. You: the gorgeous barman who served me till I fell off the stool. Ring me?”

In the last few months, I have taken to picking up one of the London free sheets, which also offers this kind of service to it’s readers.

“You brighten my commute every morning with your lovely brown hair. I’m your Central Line admirer. Give me a sign”

And generally, they’re so vague that you wonder if any of them do any good, or if everyone just assumes they’re NOT about them, and life carries on unchanged, or everyone assumes it IS about them, and the commuters of old London town start looking at everyone with a mixture of lust and suspicion. Which, now I think about it, covers the way half of them look at each other anyway.

Whatever. It’s all very sweet and terribly romantic and a beautiful reminder of the fact that every train carriage is packed with individuals with a need to love and be loved, and the instinct to reach out and make meaningful human contact with those around them and blah blah blah yawn.

See, my Brilliant New Idea has sprung from this beautiful well of humanity, but diverted via the twittered train annoyances I was telling you about last week.

It’s based on the ‘I Saw You‘ concept, but is called - and here’s where the idea grubbles off down a branch line - ‘I Hate You‘.

Or perhaps more mildly and accurately: ‘You Irritate Me‘

So it’s a way of making contact with those people you see every day, but instead of contacting them in the hope of sex, or marriage or something, you’re instead contacting them with the intention of perhaps trying to get them to shut up. Or, you know, just making them aware that there are other people in the world and that being courteous to their needs is like, in a way, caring for your own little corner of society.

‘You: On the 9.41 from London Bridge to Croydon shovelling a really smelly McDonalds into your mouth like an angry moonpig. Please slow down. You’ll give yourself indigestion. Or CHOKE And DIE.”

“No.30 Bus, Tuesday. You: were shouting into your phone about how utterly hilarious your ‘crazy’ debauched drinking weekend was. I: was sniggering behind my newspaper. So was everyone else. No, Not ‘with’ you.”

I think it is a genius idea. As well as giving people an easy way to vent their frustrations with humanity, it also - in the hope that their intended recipient read it - may provide a useful public service.

“You: on the 915am from Wokingham, wearing a red jumper, carrying a gym bag, and clearly had forgotten your deodorant. I: was sitting five seats away gagging. Woo-EEE, Mister.”

“You: were on the 8.46 from Haywards Heath biting your nails. I: found a nail fragment stuck in the folds of my skirt just after you got off. Seriously. Euw.”

So here’s my plan: a website, which people can submit to by text or IM or web or whatever, and whose content can then be syndicated by local newspapers depending on location of the postee, and I can make several billion pounds for thinking of the world’s best idea ever and never ever have to get on any kind of commuter vehicle ever again.

“You: gorgeous, tanned, smug, listening to your iPod on the central line, tea time Tuesday. I: could hear every note of the Celine Dion Greatest Hits you were listening to. Classy.

And, of course, making the world a nicer and more societally-aware place.

Hurrah!

“Does it have a fork in there?”
“What?”
“Fork?”
“What?”
“Is there a fork? In the packet?”

Late at night, in one of the convenience shops of Victoria Station, I am myself doing an impression of a fork for the benefit of another grown up human being.

It is late, and we both clearly don’t care anymore.

“OH!” He says, making a fork action in response to my interpretive fork.
“Yes!” I say.
“No.” He says.
“Oh.” I say.

There are seven minutes minutes, this evening, between arriving at the station and the train leaving for Brighton. I think we are in minute five.

What’s more: the train is leaving from a platform so far away it might as well be advertised as the ‘healthy’ route to Brighton (we’re walking at least half way there, after all…); also This isn’t my normal line, so I have had cause to buy a ticket part way; and I’m hungry. I’m very hungry. On my person was the world’s tiniest amount of change.

In the world’s smoothest movement, I went straight for the ticket machines, found no line, got my adjoining ticket, segue seemlessly to the cash point, take out enough for somehting minor to nosh upon, locate a nosh-dispensary, do a circuit of the big train-convenience shop quick enough to not waste time but thorough enough to calculate the healthiest convenience food in the entire place, and now I find myself trying to pay. And procure cutlery.

Holding a plastic container of thai noodles with a chilli lemon dressing and grilled chicken, I am standing at the till. Having come down from third in line to pay, and not having a watch on me, I am getting nervous. The train could have gone, for all I know.

“Do you have any forks at all?”
“What?”
“Behind the counter?”
“What?”
“Forks?”

I pull my best fork pose. I look like a vogueing cactus. He looks under his till, his neighbouring till, along the back wall, shakes his head and looks at me anxiously.

“I will go to other till and get a fork for you”

Nono, I say.
It is fine.
He is not to worry.
I pay, and take my change, and thank him, and leave, running as fast as I can in heels (a mincing saunter).

________________

Ten minutes later, I am on the train.

Eating with my fingers would be rude, I know. I don’t care, I’d do it without a second’s pause, generally, but the Victoria to Brighton line is a bit posh.

Twenty minutes later I am happy and full. Well, fuller.

I watch as the man opposite taps something into his phone, and cannot help but wonder idly if he is twittering.

‘On late train. Sweaty girl opposite is improvising chopsticks with two unmatching biros. Technique passable, but concept wrong. Euw’

Someone you barely know works in the building in which you work, and requests that you make them a pal on that ‘facebook‘ machine.

Though not what you would conventionally term ‘friends’, having barely been colleagues for a week, you know them well enough to know that they have a face, as do you, and on this basis you faccept them.

(I’m working on the basis that if stupid words about blog-related activities (or blactivities) can be coined by adding ‘bl’ to the beginning of a word, it follows that it must be possible with facebook and the letter ‘f’, yes? Yes. Or maybe no. Whatever)

Within twenty minutes you are alerted by The Facebook. The Facebook wishes to break the news to you that your new colleague and sometime friend (firm pal of around 18 minutes standing) has just broken up with the girlfriend you had no idea that they had in the first place. This is the type of information facebook knows we want to know about our dearest friends, and so we are finformed.

But now what do you DO? You are a friend of this person. You have written confirmation of the fact you are friends in the form of a small message with tickboxes saying ‘This person is now your friend, please confirm how you know this person‘ - so you must be close in some way, so what do you do?

Because those first few minutes are the hardest, obviously, because you know that they’re going through serious *feelings* over there, and you’re, like, number one friend on the scene - which makes you their number one friend FULL STOP, ostensibly, so what do you do?

So what’s the correct fetiquete here? Do you go over there and say

“Hey Joseph - Or do you go by Joe? Well, whatever. Anyway - listen, I’m really sorry to hear you split up with … with … hang on, I just need to look at my screen. Kate. Things must be tough for you right now, buddy. Well, I’m here for you, yeah?”

Or do you wait for the perfect moment, honing your first all-important words as the hours, days, weeks pass. Until it’s been too long and it’s just too awkward and far from being the best-ffriend you should have been when they needed you most, you’re now avoiding their eyes as you pass in the corridor and walking up five flights rather than catch the lift with them.

You should have been more than ffriend to them, and you know it. Just when they needed you most, you should have been brother, sister, kin to them, and instead you were a franger.
It’s a fkin nightmare, this fetiquette, fffrankly.

About ten years ago, I would say ‘I like flying’, and the worst possible reaction I could plausibly expect would be someone saying “Really? Are you stupid? Acres of queuing, surrounded by idiots, followed by several hours cramped in a torture chair breathing recycled air being served stale TV dinners and watching movies you wouldn’t usually watch even if the alternative was being set on fire?“. And I would say ‘Yes’, and they would say “Wow! You ARE stupid!“, which is fair enough and a matter of opinion and all that.

Now, in certain companies of certain sorts, the admission that I like flying can raise anything from a disdainful glance and an ‘Oh, Really?’ to a pointed ‘DO you?’, in a tone that would generally follow a confession of liking to stick raw bacon in your underwear or sexing other people’s spouses just for kicks.

Occasionally, of course, I can raise a full lecture from the words ‘I like flying’, which I like to think of as the Royal Flush of conversation. A ten minute recourse on why I shouldn’t like a thing that I like by someone who is trying to persuade me with arguments I already know all about.

Yes. It’s ecologically fucking terrible. I know. I am aware of the carbon emission problems. I’m sorry. I still like flying.

There are several things about flying that invariably cloud my mind from the unconscionable ecological evil that I am perpetrating by doing it.

a) By being on a plane, I get to go far far away and see new things and have new experiences and spend at least a small proportion of my time learning and revelling in newness, and generally being amazed.

b) Take off. Pulling away from solid ground and rising into the air. I know there’s a solid bunch of physics and that behind it, but I still prefer to think it’s magic.

c) While I also enjoy holidaying in this country, I very much enjoy the womder and the confusion of being in a different country. So there. I’m not snubbing my own country, it’s lovely. But there is time for both, and there are a lot of places I have yet to be.

d) Being fed stale TV dinners and watching terrible movies and drinking at lunchtime. It all feels slightly naughty, like it’s timezone bubble, a place that exists completely outside normal life, and you can do all the things you wouldn’t usually do (of course you wouldn’t) because you are too sensible and have Too Many Things To Do.

e) Planes take you far away. They just do. I can never shake the suspicion that many of the strict stop-flyingers that doomfully intone in panel shows and angrily opine on comment pages have already seen wonderful places and done wonderful things and they’re just being meanies by denying me the chance of doing it too.

f) Being above clouds, in a place where there is always sunshine, is one of the most powerful mood-enhancers I know. Just thinking about it makes my heart swell.

g) They take people who get sad without sun to places where there is sun.

So there we have it. I don’t drive a big horrible SUV. Or in fact drive. At all. I don’t use nasty home appliances that waste energy more than needs be, I recycle my little heart out, I basically live in the dark, wearing ethical hessian, and eating free range onions laid by a local farmer. But all the same, all these things, I know, come to nothing, because I am quite unrepentant about the one big bad thing.
I like flying.

So the fact that I’ve taken a vow not to do it if it can possibly be helped for the next foreseeable future - I’m trying for six months initially - has NOTHING to do with any guilty feelings or sense of environmental responsibility.

It’s because I’ve suddenly developed a completely irrational fear based on the idea that 1) too many good things are happening to me at the moment. Seriously, and
2) I’ve never been on a plane that has crashed, even though I’ve been on rather a lot of planes of late, which by the law of averages is pushing it anyway.

And those two facts together, together with one horrendous take off and one borderline hideous landing, have convinced me that I’m due a plane crash.

Yes, that is how my brain works.

So there you are. There’s no real point to this, really. I just thought that at some point someone might notice that I wasn’t flying very much, and I didn’t want you to think I’d had an attack of the ethicals and come over all environmentalistic and lost all my big nasty selfish travel-itches.

I’m just a big scaredy cat.
Well, for a bit.
When some other things go wrong again - enough to offset my present karma-footprint, or to repay my karma-debt, whatever the Gore-lingo is this week - then I’ll be straight back on a plane again.

Because I like flying. So there.

A few months ago, delayed somewhere between London Bridge and East Croydon, again, we sat, staring at each other, thinking faces on, trying to work out how many hours we’d have spent on trains once we’d lived in Brighton a year. Minutes in a journey … times two for a day’s commute … add on the inevitable ten minutes of delays … Make allowances for the possibility of fast trains, slow trains, or oh-whoops-we’ve-got-drunk-and-it’s-late-and-we-need-to-change-twice last trains… Take away holiday days, sick days, add extra time days when you have to go into town for other things and…

I am on a train!!!

Things That Should Be Banned On Trains No.8369: Stinky hot Cornish Pasties. And That guy. Definitely that guy.

Wondering where my summer is. This is terrible, I ordered it months ago, where IS it?

Thirty. Days.

In all, after a year of commuting, we’d each spent, give or take, thirty days, all told, on not particularly lovely commuter trains in and out of the capital.

Coming home from London to Brighton after the late shift, the train rumbles through a string of endless brick. It deposits weary city workers into safe little suburban towns and scoops up excitable gangs with bags of cans, drinking their way into Brighton, where they’ll drink some more, shout some more, and kiss, piss and back-street bang their way through to dawn. Ish.

The towns we pass through all have safe, comfortable names. Names that ring earbells of cups of hot, sweet tea in china mugs with flowers on the side; warm sitcom memories of ruched roman blinds in the bathroom and a sit-down mower in the garden:
Burgess Hill.
Three Bridges.
Balcombe.
Haywards Heath.
Wivelsfield.
Hassocks.
Their names sing songs of monosyllabic family meals around the oval table, while the television chunters away to itself in the adjoining sitting room. Then Katy’s off to ballet while Tommy plugs away at his Kung Fu classes. Prawn cocktail flavoured crisps stack up in the garage.

These are nice places with nice names, surely containing nice families who bring their nice children up in nice homes to be nice …

… Which is why I’m always surprised when West Sussex’s answer to some kind of Inner City LA street gang pile on to the train.

Last night was a beautiful example of this.

The train was quiet, full of returning London idiot-commuters chugging back to their lovely homes too far away. Hassocks (a dream of a village name!) was the last stop before Brighton, and at that stop, no one got on the first carriage, where my beloved and I sat, separately absorbed in laptop and crossword.

Two minutes later, the carriage door at the end of the carriage banged open, and through it tumbled a jumble of tracksuits and swearwords.

[Please note: on behalf of the beautifully delicate Soft Ears of some of my readers, I will be censoring the swearwords in the dialogue of the youths below.
I will be replacing the swearwords with items and activities that represent the suburban life they are so obviously trying to reject, just to rub in my point a little bit more, because subtlety is terribly nineties. And never terribly me.

If I told you that most of the last two sentences were originally typed on caps lock by mistake and that has made me laugh for about twelve minutes you probably wouldn't believe me, but it's true. Anyway.]

“Is this the last gardening carriage? I fishing thought there were more mothergolfing carriages than this.”

“Nah, this is it.”

Michael Parkinson HELL.”

“There are no Crazy paving seats, for sunbed’s sake. There’s only a John Lewis Wedding Listing First Class section, and we can’t sit in there, because apparently, we’re not first class net curtaining citizens. Pass me another can of troweling Stella, will you?”

They stood in the doorwell, quietly grumbling, mumbling, and swearing at slightly over-pronounced volume about not having anywhere to sit. There were plenty of places to sit. You just had to compromise, sit near other people and maybe not sit with your knees four feet apart to do it.

Their baseball caps were pulled hard down over their eyes, their tracksuit bottoms pulled hard down somewhere around their knees. I could see their pants. I was as unsure as ever why I was supposed to be intimidated by someone’s clean grundies.

“It must be hard” whispered my beloved, leaning forward.
“What?”
“You know. Growing up on the streets. Of Hassocks.”

I tried to giggle without anyone seeing.

“Yes, it is a struggle” I replied, “livin’ on the West Side. Of Hassocks”

“Indeed. Though it’s good to know you have the support of your homies, because you need your bruthas in arms when you’re popping a cap in someone’s ass during the terrible gang wars” He whispered, head cocked, streetly “Of Hassocks.”

“Yes, that is true. But I can’t help but worry when I think of them standing around, trying to scratch a living selling god-knows-what at the towers and the low rise estates…”
(I’ve watched to many episodes of The Wire, yes…)
“Yes?” he said.
“… Of Hassocks”

Our shoulders quietly shook as anything referring to the tough streets ‘Of Hassocks’ became the newest punchlline to enter our common language.

We discussed the wider social ramifications of the ‘Hassocks Problem’, and whether the malaise of the Hassocksian Youths were things that were affecting society/politics/class-divide as a whole in a whisper in our seats, before realising that they’d taken the plunge, and entered the first class carriage.

Because they’d weighed up the pros and cons, and landed softly on the side of rebel: Revenue Protectors (previously known as Ticket Inspectors) rarely come through that time of night.

And a couple of minutes later, twitchy, they came out again.

“Thing is, like, we’re getting off in a Church of England minute anyway, innit? “

“Hang on! Haven’t we just gone past our badminton clubbing stop? We wanted to get off at Souffleing Preston antimacastering Park, didn’t we?

“Oh Radio 5 Live!”

“Any-King Charles Spanieling-way, We’re nearly there. What shall we do? You wanna go and see my sister’s boyfriend’s mate’s band in that BAR, yeah? They’re well two car garaging good.”

“Yeah, we could. Hang on, no, yeah? Let’s go and sit in strimmering Churchill Square and check out da honeyz!”

“All right.”

“I’m Radio Times dying for a DIYing fag. I really Career in Admin am.”

“Me too.”

“Vauxhall Yeah”

“Yeah, but we can’t have one in the station, like, because of the ban.”

“Oh yeah, you’re right.”

“Yeah. Stupid Daily Mailing ban.”

“Soon as the doors go, we should get out of the station and off its grounds to have one.”

“Yeah!!!”

We looked at each other, safe on our seats. These sweary sweary people were menacing in their own little way, and sweary as all Apple Crumble, but, it seemed, when it came to crunches, they were very bad at actually disobeying any rules.

They tried, but they couldn’t make themselves go in the first class carriage when they didn’t have a ticket.

They thought about going to a bar when they got there, but some of them not being of drinking age, they suddenly seemed to decide it wasn’t a good idea.

They were desperate for a cigarette - clearly desperate - but nothing was going to persuade them to break the three day old ban.

We sat quietly discussing their beautifully sweary youthful incongruities, the fact that they were clearly good boys playing at being bad boys secretly dying to be good boys, while the train pulled into the station.

“Wicked, we’re here.”

“Let’s Rip it OUP man, Yeah?”

“Yeeeeaaaaaah!…

[pause]

… I have to be on the last train home though, yeah?”

And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have a very ordinary Parisian street - very close to where I was staying, in fact.

It is raining, as you will see in the picture, and we are looking down the street, with its tastefully shuttered Parisian windows, and we can see cars, and a fast food establishment.

But hold on for a moment.

What IS that sign? Yes, it’s a kebab, but then, it’s a kebab shop, and there’s also a salad, and a tree, or - no, it’s not a tree, is it?

It is a man. The man who sells the kebabs. Or, as they’re called in France, kebaps. Or kebobs. Or Kabubbies. Or something. The folding of grilled meat scraped from a skewer and placed in pitta with some salad and some hot sauce and maybe some yoghurt, and maybe a finger. Or in the case of this guy, an ear.

I mean, come on. Would YOU buy a kebab from this man?

What?! Who puts this outside their restaurant and says ‘Hey!!! THIS puppy is going to help me sell Kebops!”? Who?

Quite apart from the fact he’s been dead for about four days.

His skin is green, and falling off. His stumps, arms, whatever, are not proportional.
[Unless there are extenuating circumstances, in which case they kind of might be]

Because there were a couple of nights I may have got peckish.
But oddly, weirdly, we never bought a kebab from this man.

And. Never. Would. Either.

The architects of Paris were traditionally big fans of ‘twirly bits’ and ‘gubbins’. And also ‘faff’. I think the correct name for this is Rococo, or romanticism, or neoclassicurlywhirlyism. Or something. Still, whatever it was, they liked it a lot, and at this point we diverge.

Though terribly romantic in some ways - atmospheric and all that crap - it rains in Paris considerably more than people let on it does.

They have a strong respect for coffee, and for sitting about drinking it while watching to world go by. This is obviously correct and right, and proper.

I like their river. It is better, and there are more places for walking and picnics.

My favourite thing about London and New York is their similarity in being kinetic places: places that are seemingly powered by the movement within them, that they were places that just kept moving, and they have small pockets of stillness, and places where people relax, and all of that, but overall, I feel like in London - and from what I experienced in New York - when you move you move and when you stop, you stop for quite a while, and then relax, and never do it in the way of the Londoners or the New Yorkers unless you are a tourist.

Meanwhile, the while pace of life in Paris seems more relaxed, which I think is one of the things that people like about it. It does occasionally however, have a habit of manifesting in people just having a bit of a stand everywhere.
“What shall we do today, Marcel?”
“Oh, I do not know. Although now I think of it I was thinking I might go for a bit of a stand”
“Where might you stand, do you think?”
“Most likely right at the top of these busy Metro stairs, smoking, for a few hours, or perhaps in the centre of this Extremely Busy pedestrian junction?”
“What great ideas! Why don’t we take one each?”
[Marcel shrugs, like he wants his friend to die, a bit].
“A ha ha ha ha! Ok superb then! See you later Marcel!”

As any fule know, your enjoyment of any walky-city is directly inversely proportionate to the hurtiness of your feet.
So in brief:
- First night.
- Lovely evening, much food, wine etc.
- Dark corridor behind the street leading to dark courtyard leading to dark stairwell.
- Heels.
- Anna fucks her ligamentty bridge of foot bit up. A bit.
- Again.
- Spends next three days having intermittently lovely time but then saying things like ‘Ow’ and ‘OW!’ and ‘What do you mean the Eiffel Tower’s Still over THERE, for fuck’s sake?’

Parisians are very lovely. Or the ones that I met, anyway.
(The ones that I met in a non-waitrorial sense, obviously)
They were lovely. Parisians, as far as I can tell, like chocolate cake, and wine.
And they like them both a lot.
And any people who like those things are clearly very good with me.

Other than that I quite liked it, and it was a very nice birthday present.

(Not that someone pushed me down some stairs as a birthday present, that was my own special addition)

(And now I am home)

And have no internets.

But I am very happy, and enjoying the entertainment of certain Parisians and their tiny offspring.

And don’t worry, I haven’t really sworn at anyone.
Well, apart from the usual people. And they still seem to love me. Even THOUGH I am swearing.

Anyway. I weeeell be back. In a day or two. Probably.

Though in my absence I notice you crazy Brits have taken up bombing your airports with your cars, which is environmental in *some* ways, but we need to talk about the other ways in which it is slightly not quite right.

Luckily I am arriving by train.

(Do not tell your crazies, in case they take issue with the swearing.)