We have been together for five years, My Beloved and I. And it is because we have been together quite so long that I can tell from the slightest muscular twitch what he might be thinking.

On this occasion - as we sped through the streets of Chicago, locked into a yellow car, it was obvious to me that the twitch of the muscles at the back of his head were giving off a definite sense of being about to be taken down a dark alley and murdered by someone who may later be discovered to be the worst serial killer in the city’s history.
(They’re really very expressive twitches.)

In the back of the cab, far from the physical threat of imminent fear in the front we were far more relaxed about the ordeal. Me, an old friend from the Ionian age (a particular Loud American, if anyone’s been reading that long) and his lovely ladyfriend; we all sat there, happy in the back and enjoying the surreality of it all, so ….

So, I should start from the beginning.

________

It was just (from the outside) a normal yellow cab that we’ll hailed down on a street in some part of Chicago that I can’t remember the name of and doesn’t matter anyway.

But as soon as we got in, the driver began.

“CONGRATULATIONS!…” he bellowed, after a few social niceties about:
- where we were going (a blues club at some address or other)
- which route we should take (a good one that would get us there fast) and
- why two of us appeared to be British (because we were British).
“….YOU, ladeez and gennlemen, have had the fortune to happen upon the Singing Cabbie this evening! One of the most astounding singer-songwriting cab drivers in the WORLD! Wouldja like to hear a SARNG?”

Would we like to hear a song, we asked each other?
Yes, we decided.
“Yes” we told him.

“MENU!” He shouted, going into some kind of performance mode … “A sarng about Love? Sex? Marriage? Social Status? Honesty? Traffic? Or ‘Other’?”

It was made clear that the choice should be taken by a lady - and further settled that it should be taken by the sole lady visitor at that - in the back of the cab, the decision was left to me.
I cannot take decisions, so plumped for the one answer that seemed to avoid having to make one.

“Other, please!” I said, expecting a surprise topic. But no.

“SECONDARY MENU!” he announced, pleased. “Ageing; Chocolate; Memory; Seashells or Metaphysics?!?”

It would clearly have been criminal to have chosen a song on any topic other than metaphysics. So we sat in complete silence through four choruses and a bridge of a well constructed, lustfully sung number about what life would be like as a butterfly.

We smiled and swayed in the back, and we clapped when we thought it had finished. And then again when it actually had finished.

In the front, My Beloved stared concentratedly at the streets swishing past his window, in the fear that to turn and look at the Singing Cabbie would prompt an unstoppable fit of giggles, which might suddenly incite a shower of stabbiness on the part of the slightly terrifying man behind the wheel.

When he finished we all said it was very good, and then we all went quiet and looked out of the window, like one usually does in a cab in an unfamiliar city being hurried to a new place, and soaking up as much of the atmostphere of the city as you can, from …

“You’ve got time for another song!!!” Announced the Singing Cabbie!

“Oh! GREAT!” We said in the back, thinking that that sounded like a proper response. In the front seat I saw My Beloved’s shoulders drop an imperceptible inch.

Not wanting to have to go back to the deafening menu screen, we picked the only one we could remember from the subsidiary menu. And the song about chocolate - which came complete with an opening monologue (and an interupting phonecall, with the Singing Cabbie’s eldest daughter sounding nice but faintly embarrassed on speakerphone - we all had to shout ‘Hi’) - was a retrospective lovesong about a woman who really was crazy about chocolate. It had a chorus that centred on the words She’s a Shu-ggar Sluuuut!, if that helps.

We pulled up outside the blues club, and then sat, immobile and silent, through the last verse. And then clapped, politely, even though it wasn’t as good as the butterfly song, while waving purses and dollar bills at each other in a battle for who was going to pay the fare first. He interrupted before we could.

“Are you guys in a hurry?”

“We. Um. We’re here, right?”

“No, it’s just, if you had an extra couple of minutes, I could show you something really cool. It’s just around the corner. It’ll be a couple extra dollars on the meter, because we have to drive around there. But it’ll be worth it, I promise”

In the back, we looked at each other and shrugged, ignoring the hairs of fear bristling on My Beloved’s ears.

And, as soon as we agreed, he revved the engine back into life and pulled away from the curb once more.

My Beloved usually interjects that it was at this point in the ride, and with the man’s next words, which were “I’m a Big Fan of [outlaw and mass murderer] John Dillinger …” that he became irretriavbly convinced that the only place this ride was ending was in a damp Chicagoan basement with a Singing Cabbie standing over us with a big smile and a hacksaw, and started planning the perfect ninja defence moves he would employ to save us before it ever got to that ….

…but luckily it didn’t get to that.

We turned one corner, then another, then another, and then cruised slowly down a road where a film about John Dillinger is being made (with Jonny Depp as JD, btw, and directed by Michael Mann. I have other details, but they’re beside the point).

All the streetlamps had been turned off and moved away; temporary tramlines ran down the middle of the street; all the gaudy plastic shopfronts were replaced with wrought iron and wood - floral dresses hung on modest mannequins in the window. And on one side of the street, the cinema where Dillenger finally got caught by the FBI had been restored to how it would have looked on that night in 1934.

After whizzing through florescent streets and bright, wide freeways of the modern city it was, as the man said, quite magical.
And pretty fucking cool.

And that, ladeez and gennelmen, is the weirdest cab ride of my life.
And every word is true.
He gave us a flyer on the way out of the cab.
Here it is.

(click images to see them bigger)

“Who gets The Singing Cab driver is a cosmically selective process. When your karma is due, he’ll arrive to make your day, shamelessly promote his career agenda and deliver your destination in one piece, right side up”

Brilliant.

I find it very hard to keep secrets. If I have some exciting news, and I absolutely positively cannot let people know for one various reason or another, I am very bad indeed at that. I find it torturous.

In fact, it is easier for me to just try and avoid those people, to not talk to them at all, than to talk to them and have to keep my secret. I’d rather cross the road and pretend I didn’t see them than make eye contact, start smalltalk and then have to lie when they say “What’s going on with you?”

Which is why I’ve been very quiet this week on my blog.

I have a secret. And I can’t tell you, no. I’ve got a couple of stories from my holiday just past that I still need to write up and put on here, but until I am allowed to talk publicly about the thing currently occupying 85% of my brain, I might be a little bit quiet.

And no, before the inevitable 30 people ask, I’m not pregnant, not trying to GET pregnant and haven’t suddenly popped out a personpet without even realising I WAS pregnant in the first place. That much I can tell you.

The rest I can’t. And it’s driving me nuts.

I just sent someone this email - another blogger I know through various things and events and people, but an anonymous one, so I’m blanking out all the names.

Anyway, something happened this morning, and it’s freaking me out a little tiny bit, so I’ll just cut and paste the email I had to send in response, and not say any more.

Hello XXX.

Anna Pickard here, blogger, friend of XXX’s. Last saw you in London at XXX’s party. Anyway - just thought you might want to know that in a series of coincidences I’m just trying to work out … This morning I …

a) opened a piece of mail by mistake without looking at the front, thinking it was a card for us
b) found that it wasn’t, too late, and that it was a card for the previous residents of the house.
c) recognised the name in in the card
d) checked on facebook if you happened to know the previous residents of my house. And you do.

So just to let you know - X and X didn’t get your congratulationary card, and you might want to email them and find out what their new address is. Um. Because they haven’t lived here since Febuary 07, at least (which is when we moved in) and I don’t have a forwarding address. Also I opened their card, which looks a bit suss.

Ok. so. Yeah. Um. Hope you’re well!

a

It is a very weirdly small world, sometimes.

This will be the end of questions for at least a while, I promise - or at least we’ll swap so you can ask me some or something. But last week I had you helping me with my professional homework, this week it’s something else entirely. Now you have to help with my therapy homework. Seriously. And this week, in order to try and work on some of my irrational fears about interviewing people (yes, and I’m supposed to be a journalist, it’s fucking hilarious, right?) I have to take a little survey about this thing:

Can you just answer me this: If someone approached you in the street or in a pub or on a station or something and asked you if they could ask you some questions about a particular subject - in a journalistty way rather than a charity-donation way or a marketing way, what would your reaction be?

Would you be ok with it?
Would you be annoyed at being approached?
Would you be pleased to have the opportunity to give your opinion?
Would you just get very cross and maybe punch people in the face?
Or something else. What would your reaction be, do you think?

There are some bloody dreadful photos floating around out there of me, but this isn’t one of them (Yes, there are worse…) but I just want to show you how you helped.

So on Saturday, I was giving a very brief talk at a conference on why I think some words are funnier than other words, and, as a presentation, I had a slideshow of the words you suggested the other day. (I thanked you and everything, I promise). So there you have it. just so you know I wasn’t asking for no reason.

It is the end of the day, and the traffic wardens are wearily walking back up the road to their nesting place at the end of my street, ticketbooks tucked into their belts.

“OY!” shouts an angry voice from the other side of the street. “OY! You! WANKAHS! Get a fuckin’ JOB!”

I understand that drivers don’t like traffic wardens.
I understand that people bear grudges.
I understand that people sometimes feel the need to vent their frustrations.

But “Get a fucking job”?

When you’re a man in vest halfway through your second pint at four o’clock in the afternoon, and they’re a bunch of people in uniform carrying out a role that they’re paid to carry out, I just think you might put a little more earnest thought into your venom before spitting it.

That is all.

Spotted on the streets of DC: They have helpful little friendly signs to remind you that you should be scooping up the lumpy stuff that comes out of your dog.

Even more helpfully, someone seemed to have parked their doggie poop-scoop next to the sign.

Boy, we thought, they must have a really, really big dog.

Or just be quite lazy. Or, you know, insert your own gag here etc.

For reasons I will promise to expand upon later, I need a list of words that people find intrinsically funny. whether
- because of the way they sound,
- because they’re made-up mash-ups of other words stuck together in a pleasing way,
- because of the connotations they associate with the word itself or
- well, any other reason, really

I don’t need to know why - though if you’d like to try and explain why, that would also be really helpful - and I promise you’re not doing my homework for me - just for the purposes of this thing that I’m doing that I’ll tell you about afterward; I need your help. I really do.

Can you tell me please - what are your favourite funny words?

In Washington we were staying with some friends who are pregnant.

Not all of them, not literally, just the female one. But that’s what you say nowadays, isn’t it? You just refer to everyone being pregnant. All at once. Rather than just the ones who physiologically are.

Not everyone, I mean, that would be insane. You just refer that way to people in couples with one person who IS.
Who ‘is’ in a state of pregnancyness, I mean (technically known as ‘Vacationing in Pregnancia until a baby falls out of their undercarriage‘ by Doctors).

Anyway, of the two people we were staying with, one of them was technically up the duff and the other one had put her up it, and it was all very beautiful and a miracle of wonderfulness, well done them, hurrah etc.

However, from the non-pregnanteer’s point of view, the best thing was getting to read magazines and books that you just don’t have any reason to read with names like Almost Mothering and Top Breastpump! and Pregnancia and Beyond: A Guide to Your New Loud Smelly Personpet and Woo, Childbirth!. Although strictly speaking they didn’t seem to have any of those, so I might have to search Amazon to get those particular titles for them. But they did have this one:

Which had a terrifyingly pale lady on the cover, which was the first thing that was slightly alarming. I mean, I know you’re supposed to ‘glow’ sightly during pregnancy, but I’d be quite wary of the actual iridescence of this woman. She’s radioactive, surely. She’s some kind of evil superhero. She’s so pale, she’s florescent. It’s Not Bloody Natural, I tell you.

Actually, I should clarify, when I say I was enjoying ‘reading’ these magazines, I should clarify that I was mainly enjoying looking at pictures and playing cheerful rounds of ‘Seriously, What the hell is THIS?‘ on the shopping pages with other people who haven’t had that much experience of ‘All That’ either. And then looking at the adverts. Because adverts are great.

In the pages of adverts there were generally agreed to be two winners. One won the Jesus, REALLY?! Award 2008 for the revelation that some people forget to take their children out of their cars and, if they are not manually reminded by a small gadget, their children die.

It is a tragic thing. According to this advert, people forget that they put their children in the back of their car, and go off and do their shopping or whatever, and leave the children in the car. And if it is a hot day … well, I’m sure you’ve all seen the campaigns about dogs in hot cars. Well, it’s like that. But so much worse.

So, tragically, some parents leave their tiniest members in their cars. Some by absent-mindedness, some, apparently, for convenience. And according to some research I did: this isn’t even against the law everywhere! To be fair, though, this gadget seems to assume that it’s ALWAYS ‘forgetfulness’ that causes this - though it’s hard to tell how accurate their figures are, exactly. Especially as their print ads say that this happens once every ten days and their website claims it to happen ‘every day’. Which you really think you’d hear about more often.

And there isn’t any way of telling the difference between those parents who actually FORGOT and those who were criminally stupid enough to think it might be fine and reasonable to do that for a while rather than cart your own beloved progeny about or hire a babysitter.

I tend to suspect, sadly, that the instance of the latter must be higher than that of the former - because while there are both dangerously forgetful and dangerously stupid people in the world, there’s a hell of a lot more of the latter.

Anyway, just in case the there more of the former than I think - and god knows I’m scatty, but I think I’d remember some things - there is a gadget that you can buy. Just in case you are of an absent-minded disposition. It apparently clips to somewhere in your car, and whenever you stop, it plays a memory jogging song.

I don’t know exactly what the song is, but I think it might be called “Hey Fucknuts, Your Spawn Is In the Back Seat, How Stupid ARE You Exactly?! (Hey, Hey, Hey)’

I suppose it might be easier than I think to forget. You must have so many things to think about. Especially when, like this lady, you are carrying out a high-flying executive career AND trying to express breastmilk at the same time:

I love it. Look! She’s very busy on the phone AND, if you looked at the full advert, she was also shuffling important business papers, and just happily expressing breastmilk all the while.

Gleeful is the message of the happy advert, then. Because you, professional woman of infinite ability and worth: you’re not going to lose your ability to multitask just because you’ve gone through a traumatic fanny-stretching and joyful addition to the population of the world, hurrah!

However, you have just left your baby in the car.
Well, something had to give.

Yes, for once a publicity post. But for BLOODY good reason, because This project is another one of those ‘bringing bloggererers together and getting them to contribute to a book for charity’ things that are a Good and Proper model of why people are nice and the internet is a good and beautiful thing.

I will add picture and Go Buy It NOW links to this post when I am less work-exhausted and needing-bed things, but I have been meaning to post a link to the Very Good Book for days and have sworn off writing anything else till I managed that but then got very very very busy. So there. I am glad I have, because it is GOOD.

All the proceeds go to Warchild, which is a good good thing.
And yes, I’m in it. But many many many better and gooder writers are also, so I would tell you to buy it even if I wasn’t.

You can buy it here.

There were only a couple of minutes until we had to run for the movie. I wolfed down the end of my bread and sucked hard on my straw to drain the last of my glass.

We were going to see a film - just the females of the group, it was kind of an unwritten law, given the film we were going to see - and so I politely excused myself and made for the bathroom. Better now than queuing at the cinema with the 95% female audience, I thought, as I headed to the back of the restaurant.

There was just one little room - it was just one little restaurant, so that was hardly surprising - and, opening the door, I flicked the switch outside it. Nothing happened. I flicked it again. No light that had been on went off, and no light that was off went on. There was either some kind of light/switch problem, I thought, or this was a completely meaningless switch just put there to antagonise tourists.

No matter, I thought. They will not beat me so easily! I am plucky, and British, and resiliant to all their cheap tourist-bating tricks! I will piss in the dark! It’s called blitz mentality, my friends, and it’s in our veins! And our bladders! Take that! I thought, and closed the door behind me.

There is detail to be left out at this point, as even the longstandiest blogger has her privacy levels, though I would like to note the following train of thought:

“This must be what it is like peeing when you are blind. It’s very dark in here. Pitch black, in fact. So if I was blind, this is what it would be like. Interesting. I’m pretty good at this. I could totally do blind, I think. In fact…”

And at this point I bent over to pull up my jeans and a piece of plaster moulding that had been quietly lurking on a corner of wall next to the door leapt out and punched me in the face.

I am a little accident prone, it must be said, but even My Beloved was surprised when I managed to come back from a two minute trip to the toilet bleeding from the eyebrow.

Grabbing my coat and shaking my fringe over my eyes, I put on my cheeriest voice. “Shall we go then?!” I blitzed, cheerfully - and as the other women of the City collected their belongings to go and watch some Sex In It, bent over and mumbling asked if it looked bad. “Youch” said my beloved, helpfully.

At the cinema I held a tissue over the lump the size of half a boiled egg and wished I had ordered something with ice in it, as rubbing the damn thing with salted popcorn was going to do no good whatsoever.

And then, as the girliest film in the history of hymens flickered before my eyes, I realised a terrible thing. Blitz mentalities might be all well and good; stoicism is super, and stiff upper lips are marvellous things to behold. But I was in the most litigious country in the world, and I had totally, totally missed a trick.

And yes, yes, I know, all this talk, and all you want to see is pictures….
Bastards. Here you are: