Addendum

A horrifying thought has occurred to me. When we were leaving the pub and I was asked which way I was going, I told the one who brought the pretty that I was going whichever way I'd have company, figuring that everyone was headed to the same place. Except it turned out they weren't. "He's going to Vauxhall, that would be quicker for you, wouldn't it?" came the response from the Bringer.

What if, instead of the helpful getting-me-home-quicker response it seemed to be at the time, it was actually a response to a "get-me-away-from-the-crazy-woman" look from Pretty over my head, that I just didn't notice at the time as I rifled through my vast but strangely empty brain for an excuse to head to the Northern line? What if the look that I thought was "nice to meet you" as we waved goodbye to everyone was, in actual fact, "thank god she's gone with him?"

And now we know it's a serious crush. Because the insecurity has kicked at full force in record time. Dammit. Insanity and crushes, who knew they went together so well? Oh yeah, that's right. Everyone knows. That's where the romantic comedy was born.

Uh Oh

I seem to have developed a dilemma that I'm kind of forced by circumstances to write out here. See, I made the mistake of doing Friday night drinks after work. Normally, not a problem there. In fact, quite the reverse. It's always a giggle to stand around in a pub and take my time over pints while the guys entertain me with whatever comes into their heads to talk about.



It seemed to be heading that way tonight. The guys were in rare form, discussing far ranging subjects that touched on a whole load of my interests. And then it happened. The friend of one of the guys turned up and I found myself tumbling headlong into the biggest crush I've had in a long time. The timing is a little odd, given that L woke me up during the week to tell me that she'd seen the last of my enormous crushes at the tennis in Melbourne. Maybe that set the scene. But whatever the cause, I spent most of the time trying to subtly engage him in conversation - he came in when I was about a pint down after a lunch of healthy, but definitely not stomach lining soup, so I was up for the chatty approach - but at the same time hoping that none of the guys caught onto the fact that I was head over heels with the Irishman in the white t-shirt.



I was thinking for a bit there that I didn't know much about him and, in some respects, I still don't. But at the same time, it doesn't matter. I know that he likes plays, and movies, that he's from Belfast and close to his family. He's tall and good looking and has an accent that means he says things like "fill-um" when he means film. He lives not too far from me, loves a good pub, and has been to Australia some time in the not too distant past. He ventures to Camden and doesn't like the "Primrose Hill set". He doesn't know the meaning of the word insipid, but he likes the sound of it. He didn't seem to be against engaging me in conversation, but at the same time spoke to pretty much everyone there. And he had something about him that made me look as soon as he walked in the door.



So now I will spend days thinking about him, wondering if I should say something to the guy from work whose mate he is. Thinking I should have taken the detour to walk with them to the Northern line tube instead of going with the much closer and generally more practical Victoria line and the less interesting conversational stylings of the one who was going that way. And I'll spend tonight longing for someone to be close enough for me to sit down and analyse the night, to tell me that of course he likes me - regardless of their real opinion. But instead, I'm here all but alone tonight, still slightly tipsy from beer, with a flatmate locked away in her room skyping her boyfriend on the other side of the world, and another flatmate home in Australia and incommunicado for the moment, completely unaware of my revery. So I'm blogging, and hoping that somewhere, someway, I'll get to know more about him, get to talk to him again. But figuring that it's never going to happen, because that's the way my crushes run.

Sprung

It has long been accepted that the seasons influence moods, sanity, general well being. Generally, summer makes us happy and winter makes us miserable. There's a reason that Scandinavian countries have high suicide rates and Russia has a history of producing long and depressing literature. But today brought out a new aspect of seasonal affected disorder, something I'd witnessed before but never really traced to something specific. Until this morning, that is.

I was, as usual for anything happening before lunchtime, running late for work this morning. I was fairly motoring along as I walked to the tube, but, as I powered up the hill, my shortness of 0f breath meaning I had my own personal cloud surrounding my head thanks to the cold, I saw something that added an extra bounce to the hurried semi-trot my pencil skirt was forcing me into. About halfway up the hill, in the garden of a big Georgian white house straight out of a fairytale, a magnolia tree has gone mad. Just so we're clear here, winter is very much still with us. Last week, there was snow and ice that only disappeared with what seemed at the time for anyone caught in it to be torrential rain. But since the snowfall of last Wednesday (which brought about an official apology from the weather forecasters, in a first ever admission of all-round crapness that wasn't nearly comprehensive enough), the weather has felt decidedly mild. Gone is the run of sub-zero temperatures. In it's place, a steady flow of comparatively mild 6's, with occasional sunshine breaking up the miserable rain and fog. The mildness of last Sunday in particular has had an effect on the poor magnolia. It's been deluded into thinking that spring is on it's way and has begun to sprout buds.

This tree has led me astray before, so I'm trying not to get carried away here. I remember last year, noticing that there were actual leaves on the tree just days before the heaviest snowfalls to hit London in almost twenty years. It is surely the most optimistic of trees, running far ahead of its neighbours in it's rush for winter to be behind it. But I couldn't help but smile a little at the thought that, sometime in the not too distant future, spring will come. And with it will end the harshest, coldest and last of my northern hemisphere winters. I can hardly wait.

But neither, it seemed, could a couple of other people out and about today. Because, in the space of about ten minutes this afternoon, I looked from my window at work to see two more people who have clearly emerged from the depths of winter without their sanity. The first was a woman, middle aged and seemingly ordinary until you noticed that her lower half was covered by a skirt. And nothing more. She was clearly not wearing stockings. Nor was she wearing boots - footwear of choice for the sane pretty much every day so far this year - or even closed in shoes. She had summery sandals on her feet instead. And they weren't even blue.

Closely following her, a man proved that weather-induced insanity is not gender specific. Sure, Britain, and England in particular, is known for the first hint of sun bringing out the sunbathers in the parks; topless men and bikini clad women risk frostbite annually on days when I'm still debating the need for my winter woollies. But this guy? The first of the year to be exposing skin whilst sober, surely. He was wearing shorts and thongs or, for those non-Aussies who are slightly disturbed by the thought of a man walking down the street in a thong, flip-flops. He wasn't out for a run. He wasn't just popping to the shops. He was headed somewhere specific, I don't know where. But I didn't see him come back, so I'm guessing the men in the white coats caught up with him eventually and took him somewhere warm. If it's toasty enough, it's almost tempting to copy him, to be honest. But no, I'm holding out for the weekend. Apparently, it's going to reach a whole 8 degrees. Heatwave conditions. I'm not sure how I'll cope...

Top Quality

I've been reading chick lit again. Devouring it, in fact, ever since I got back from New York. The latest conquest is the I Heart... series by Lindsey Kelk. It's thrown up a couple of questions though. Like how you can stick a disclaimer at the front of a book claiming no real or intended resemblance to any real person, then proceed to rip off reality. Sure, sounds harsh, but let me explain why I'm saying this.

The basic premise of the first book in the series is that Angela Clark, a Brit, runs away to New York when she finds her fiance cheating on her. So far, so chick lit. You just know there's going to be romance, new friends, smiles, tears and general dramas waiting for her as she gets her life together in a new city. The catch is, for me, that her first friend is a girl called Jenny Lopez. There are a load of references to the fact that she's not "that" Jenny Lopez, but still. Then she hooks up with a guy called Tyler Moore. Just like Mary Tyler Moore, but without the Mary. So naming characters is clearly not the author's strong point. The next character with a full name is Alex Reid. Hmm, I'm thinking this might have been written around about the time that Katie Price split from Peter Andre. Sensing some topical naming going on. What was she doing, sitting with a gossip mag on her lap, and an old TV show on the box while she was writing? And given the James-Blake combination in the second book of the series, well, anyone for tennis?

But whatever. What really got to me, though, was her description of Alex's 'hipster' New York born and bred band, Stills. See, this one is also remarkably close to reality. There really is a New York based band called The Stills who, just like the band in the book, had been together for nine years when it was written and met in art school. So she dropped the "The" and stuck her incarnation of the then-current squeeze of a celebrity in the front of the band instead of the real life Canadian who is really their lead singer. Wow, that makes it all totally original, I guess.

See, I don't read these books for their original plotting; there is something comforting about knowing that the girl's life is going to get totally screwed up but, by the end of the 300-odd pages (because they're almost always about 300 pages long) she will have gotten it together, whether 'it' is her love life, her career, her friends, her family, or some combination of the above. It's nice to see someone who, other than their ability to both afford and fit into designer clothes whilst eating hearty meals (because, after all, size 12 involves having an arse of monstrous proportions in that world, right?), could, theoretically, be you. If the world was a little more perfect. But come on folks. You can have a genre specific novel without ripping off EVERYTHING from somewhere else. Use a little ingenuity, please. Otherwise those of us who enjoy reading books with caricatures of beautiful women carrying loads of shopping on the covers will never be able to raise our heads on the tube for fear of meeting the eyes of anyone else in the carriage. The judgement attached to the knowledge that there is no defence for our reading choices will chatter us forever and reading chick lit, like overindulging on chocolate, will become a guilty pleasure to be hidden. And those of us who attempt to write anything at all will turn green - not necessarily with envy, more along the lines what happens when the Incredible Hulk gets angry - at the thought of what HAS been published, while knowing our own manuscripts would never make it out of the slush pile.

So, in a plea to all the people who write and publish these books, some quality control, please. I know, they sell like hot cakes. But has the publishing world totally sold it's soul? Has editorial surrendered control of the presses to the marketing department? And can the next I Heart book hurry up and come out? Because I want to know how Angela's life is going to fall apart in Paris, and just how many hot men she is going to hook while dressing herself in designer clothes on a freelance writer's salary. And my own celeb-inspired novel? Well, as soon as I decide which Olsen twin to base a character on, it'll be in the mail to the nearest publisher.

Nit Picking

I've been indulging in a little naval gazing lately, partly brought about by a dose of the flu, partly by the weather, which has made it so that I'm terrified to set foot outside the house for fear of falling on my arse, getting filmed doing it, and ending up on funniest home videos. That's led to a whole lot of examining why I'm so clumsy and why I'd rather sit inside and look at the pretty through the window than venture out and experience it first hand. Because it has been pretty. And I do love snow once I lever myself out of the chair and pull on every item of clothing I own - not just because it's cold, but also in a vain attempt to cushion as much of me as possible; given that I woke up this morning feeling like I'd managed to dislocate both hips in my sleep, I think it's a futile exercise.

But at least I think I've found the source of my inner klutz. It's a result of my innate laziness. The incident where I tripped and ploughed headfirst into the side of a train? Was because I'm too lazy ti lift my feet properly after the first hundred metres of sprinting. Being falling-down-sober in the casino and ending up with a seriously sprained ankle and a trip out of the service entrance in a wheel chair? Because I was too lazy to pay attention to just how many stairs there were. The ball flying off my own hockey stick and into my face? Product of a half-arsed attempt to tackle someone in a training drill. Doing the splits getting off a bus in Tallinn Christmas before last? Because I was too lazy to use muscles properly to step down slowly and just went flop - in more ways than I'd expected as it turned out. And my current inability to walk down the icy footpaths now that London has officially stopped gritting any non-major roads? That would be my failure to develop the stomach muscles necessary for balance.

Given half a chance, I could easily become one of those hermits who crops up in kids movies, the one who has the messy, rundown house but is never seen. The scary neighbour who, like Boo Radley, the only reason you know they're still in there is because you haven't seen someone carry them out yet. And the inevitable consequence for me of living like that would be the way they'd eventually have to get me out of the house; it would also be like something off the TV, only it would be the shows where they have to remove the wall of the house and use a crane to lower out the lard ball trapped within. My laziness is accompanied by a deep and abiding love of all things bad for me. Television, books, writing, hell, even sewing. So many things that can keep me occupied for days, weeks, months, without needing to step beyond the bounds of the living room, the kitchen, my bedroom. As long as there is something for my mind to do, I could be content. Strangely, my mind has never been lazy. It's always been rather active, in fact, mostly in search of reasons for me not to be up and moving. I guess something had to move, just to prove that I was alive.

But it turns out that I've always been lazy, right from the very beginning. When I was still rolling around on the floor, refusing to even sit under my own steam at an age when most kids were walking, I was taken to the doctor for fear that there was something seriously wrong with me. And it turned out there was. I have been medically diagnosed as stubbornly lazy. When propped on cushions, I would dig my heels in until I was once again lying on my back. I learnt to talk incredibly early so that I could order my brothers to bring me anything I wanted. I'm fairly certain that this early show of determined sloth had resulted in the lack of stomach muscle definition I am blaming for my appalling balance. My suspicions weren't contradicted by last weekend's phone call to my parents.

I seem to have been a topic of general conversation in Melbourne, where they have been wondering how I cope with the cold (refer above for the answer: I don't. I make an environment where it isn't cold and I stubbornly refuse to acknowledge any alternative). There have been news reports of people falling and breaking bones. Mum is justifiably convinced that I'm going to join the ranks of these people. Given my track record, I can understand the concern. She was trying to make sure that I had the right shoes on when I went outside, but I promised her I hadn't left the house without wearing hiking boots since Christmas, that it wasn't that I didn't have the right shoes, but rather that I didn't have the right balance. Mum's response was typical, fast and to the point.

'Yes, you were never very good at rollerskating, either, were you.'

Confirmation from an unexpected source - when your mother doesn't defend your abilities, you've really got no hope, and besides, how many other people went rollerblading and ended up getting stuck on tramlines? I was a truly terrible skater - I've cringed every time I set foot outside this week until the overnight rains washed away the last of the snow and ice. If they hadn't, I might have been forced to dig my heels in once more, but this time to avoid being flat on my back. One of these days, I'll just give up and stay inside. And on that day, you can call me Boo.

Feeling for Snow

It's been snowing in London. It's been bitterly cold with it. I've been lucky, in some respects, because a dose of the flu has kept me at home - although L believes that I shouldn't have stayed home when my sinuses felt like golf balls were lodged underneath my eyes, but should rather have gone to work and saved my sick leave for something more serious; I'm guessing she expects me to have an accident bad enough to require amputation one of these days. But it has meant that I haven't been forced to venture out since the snow started falling, which in my world can only be a good thing. I'm well enough this morning to have to go out though, and I'm not looking forward to it. Because last night, listening to the cars on the street skidding into each other at low speeds - or in the case of one unfortunate ambulance, higher speeds, it occurred to me that there are things you don't know about snow if your only contact with it while you're growing up comes through the television. So here is my later life list of lessons about snow.

First up, while it's falling, it's basically rain. In movies, it always looks so pretty, giving everything a nice white dusting. And when you're watching it falling through a window, the prettiness holds. When you're caught out in it without an umbrella, on the other hand, you will come in looking like a drowned rat. Just a little colder than the usual and in some cases, a drowned rat with dandruff until the flakes finish melting.

Snow makes sounds while it's falling, but also somehow seems to deaden some sounds at the same time as it makes others travel further. The soft rushing noise of it's falling always alerts me to the need to look out the window. If it's falling to softly for the noise to reach me, the absence of other sounds at home let me know that there's something going on. The traffic noise seems to disappear into the mush. But at work, it's the ability to hear the bells of the church near the tube. On normal days, they can't be heard over the noise of traffic. On snow days, it's like being next door to the steeple.

Walking through fresh snow also makes a lovely crunching noise as your boots break the surface tension. It's a crisp sound, lovely to hear the first time, until you realise that everybody who's out to make that sound is really just compressing the snow. It's then that you learn that your life in a sunny climate has in no way equipped you for life in a cold one. You can't skate, you can't ski, and you damned sure can't walk on the skating rink that snowy footpaths become as more and more people flatten the snow into ice. Because crushed snow, the kind that you find on footpaths, for example, is not the pretty crunchy stuff that fresh snow is. It is hard packed ice that the inexperienced have to shuffle along, like the cars on the road with wheels spinning but no traction. Until the men with their shovels and grit make it to work and start clearing safe pathways, footpaths become dangerous territory. And there's no escape.

For all that, though, it is really beautiful. The novelty of seeing London covered in a soft snowy blanket makes up for the days of stomach clenching misery that follow as I negotiate my way to work.

Ooh, work...damn, late again. Oh well. The other thing about snow: it makes a convenient excuse for tardiness.

Forfeits

I got back from my annual Christmas/New Year trip to pretend that I'm not an orphan yesterday. Flatmate L and I were in New York. First impression is that I can't really give a first impression of a place that seems to familiar; after seeing it in so many TV shows, movies, clips, books, the geography of the place is so familiar, the accents, the lifestyle, everything about it seemed like I'd been there before. It was a great trip. And now, I have to pay the price of that.

The most obvious cost is that I'm jet lagged. Not nearly as badly as the last time I went home - I feel like I could be awake until at least 3 pm. But the tiredness isn't the true cost of the jet lag. It's a little more complicated than that. See, L is, in some ways at least, superhuman. She doesn't need to sleep, or that's what she's convinced herself. So, she doesn't. All during the trip, I experienced the joy of being woken up when she decided it was time. And today, she felt that I had slept enough, deciding to try the subtle method of turning on the TV, which is right over my bedroom. Except she turned it onto a music video channel - her favourite viewing selection, if Friends isn't available - and now we will have Lady Gaga running on high repeat for the rest of the afternoon. Now don't get me wrong, I like a good music video as much as the next person. Unless the next person is L, because she has something of an obsession with them. But after the first hour, the repetition drives me insane. And I was proud that I managed to get through our trip away without killing her, so I'd like to keep that record intact. Not likely when Gaga is telling me that he can't read her poker face.

Of course, the other penalty is that I have to head back to work tomorrow to pay for it all. And for the first time since August, I won't be on reduced hours. Welcome to 2010. There's a whole month of working full weeks until the almost full pay kicks back in. And I'm so excited about the full pay that it was easy to forget about the extra time at work. Not that we work so hard in the first place - it's still a lighter load than any full time job I did back in Australia. But the first week back after a break is always tough. It feels like a month. And that's when it's a short week. The tricks of the calendar make this a full week. Joy. Well, I guess I did spend nearly every penny I earned - and a few that I didn't, thanks to the wonders of credit cards - so here we are, back with me needing to work.

But then I think back to being in New York. To sitting on a distinctly lopsided boat while fireworks went off next to the Statue of Liberty for midnight, and it suddenly seems worth it. Because at the end of the day, I'll still pay almost any penalty in order to travel. I just reserve the right to bitch about it when I get back.

Mythbusters

Anyone living with their head under a rock might not have noticed that there's a climate change conference going on in Copenhagen at the moment. In honour of this fact - or maybe not in honour, but rather coincidentally - my office has sent around an email to explain what the company is doing to improve on our environmental performance.

There were all the usual things you'd expect; changing from the bottled water that used to get delivered weekly to filtered mains water, recycling bins around the office, advice to turn off computers when we leave for extended periods of time and to unplug any chargers left lying around. So far, so ordinary, and easily put into practice. In fact, most of these things, except perhaps the water, have been accepted practice for the entire time I've been at the company. It's the final aspect that has been most difficult to accept.

We have been advised to cut back our printing levels. Just to be clear, the paperless office concept has been around for a long time now. It has never made so much as a dint in the world of architecture though, unless you count the zeal with which young architects throw marked up drawings, criss-crossed with the red pen of their superiors, into the recycle bins bound to be scattered around offices. It only takes a moment to realise that it's not even our fault. While we design buildings that can run off the power of a sneeze, it takes thousands and thousands of trees dying to generate the documentation to get them built. Firstly, we have to supply the authorities with three sets of everything at A3, and often one at full size A1 as well (take your average A4 sheet, double that to get A3, double that to get A2...you get the picture, right?). The client always demands at least one set. Every contractor that tenders for the project gets their own set. There's a copy kept on file. Every time there is a change to a drawing, it has to be sent out again. Then, on the really big projects, there's the mother of all tree killers: the A0 set of drawings. 40 to 50 sheets, enough paper to keep New York's homeless warm and dry for a year. Paperless office? Yeah, we wish. We could issue all of this in electronic format, as PDFs. But twits ask us to print it. In fact, they require it.

The result could be seen as I wandered to the door tonight on my way out. One of the side effects of our new hours is a much closer relationship with the office cleaners. The directors have to lock up themselves, now, instead of employing security staff to do the job for them. So they can get home at a reasonable hour, the cleaners come around bang on our official finishing time. Where before they were faceless smokers outside, chatting to each other in Polish as they waited to come inside, now they are people. We talk to them, we are aware of the way they work. Seeing one woman going around the top floor with a squirty bottle and a rage, trying desperately to find a clear space to be wiped - and failing, for the most part to manage more than one squirt per pod - it occur ed to me to wonder just how much paper was being generated by the climate change conference in Copenhagen, and whether they'd come up with a solution to bureaucratic red tape. Somehow, I doubt it.

Weekend Wreckage

I'm feeling the effects of hosting a party on Saturday night. Sure, there wasn't anything in the flat broken. The guests were better behaved than last time I hosted a dinner, and ended up cleaning up after a wasabi pea fight for a couple of weeks afterwards. Did you have any idea just how far those things can roll? And I'm sure some of them were playing a game with me and jumping out of the bin, back under the couch, because no matter how many times I moved it, there was always at least one pea underneath. In fact, there's probably still one there now. But no, the carnage wreaked wasn't on my flat.

Nor was it on my flatmate. She recovered brilliantly, as far as I'm aware. She was certainly fit enough to be seen in public yesterday, darting around the west end in a frenzy to try and get her Christmas shopping done and so avoid the worst of the seasonal retail binge. I stayed at home, afraid that leaving the house would make small children cry. Because the damage caused was very much a visible problem. And it had nothing to do with a hangover.

I was out on Friday night as well, so I had every right to be feeling the effects of a little partying. At the very least I should have been tired. But I wasn't. Instead, I was ashamed to show myself in public because of a problem I've had from time to time over the years. It seems that not only liver, kidneys, stomach and head are effected by a night of partying. The beautifying process takes a severe toll on my hair as well.

It's trivial, I know. To anyone not blessed with the horrendous mass of fur that grows from my head, it would be nothing. But, after years of attempting - and generally failing - to control my wig, on Saturday I let it have its way. In fact, I encouraged its worst tendencies. I scrunched. I teased. I fluffed. I sprayed with so much hairspray that I had to leave my room or risk suffocation. In short, I worked very hard to get myself into the correct frame of hair for an 80s party, like we were having. Then I made a token gesture at control by tying a leftover piece of my bright yellow t-shirt dress around my head in a big floppy bow.

But now my hair has tasted freedom. It has experienced the thrill of flying free, and it liked it. This morning, even smothering it with a close fitting hat did little to bring it down to earth - or at least to my scalp. Because each individual strand was making a stand, being an individual, and pulling in a slightly different direction to its neighbour. This morning, it was bigger than it was on Saturday night. And where the air went out of it over the course of the party, today, in spite of pins and elastics acting as restraints, its only gotten bigger.

I guess you need to have big hair to appreciate it. My balding brother, for instance, gets a bitter twist to his face every time I bitch about having too much and how hot it gets on my neck if I leave it down. But he's not the one who has to wrestle it under control. I'm like a lion tamer cracking the whip; half an hour with a hair dryer here, 20 minutes with irons there. I can split it into two braids and each of those will still be thicker than the average person's allowance. It's not even curly, so there's no excuse for it. That it's naturally the colour of rope doesn't help. If I grew it longer, I could do a fair Rapunzel. All I'd need is the Prince. Oh, and the tower. And loads of anaesthetic to numb my scalp, given that self-weight of my ponytail can bring on a headache if I club it up too high.

I know, I know. Somewhere out there, people are telling me that the grass is always greener. And it is. After all, I could at least sleep on my soft, billowing cushion of locks and hairspray. One friend would have spent several hours trying to get her hair down from the punkish spikes she was sporting, complete with an entire pot of wax holding it in place. So at least there's that, I guess. Oh who am I kidding. I'd shave it off in a second if I didn't think it was just grow back thicker. And probably curly, just for that extra bit of oomph. I've learned one lesson, though. Never, ever, give it a taste of what it would have been like to be running wild and free in the days of big hair. Because it will takes weeks to recover from the hangover.

Well good, innit

For a city that experiences such vile weather, London is seriously poorly equipped to handle it. Tonight, the rain has come down in sheets, the kind that you wrestle to get into the washing machine and then discover that you don't have enough space to dry them once they're done. Much the same way that the gutters, downpipes, awnings, footpaths and roads can't get rid of the sheer volume of water that has built up in them.

As I dodged the deepest puddles and clung to the furthest point from the cars on the road, which were carelessly offering a free shower to any pedestrians foolish enough to stray near the edge, I wondered why it was, exactly, that I'd decided against "borrowing" one of the golf umbrellas leaning nonchalantly by the desk of the office klepto. Especially given that he wasn't even in the office to keep me by his desk with an entertaining (i.e. nauseating) sound and light display, a combination of his poor eating habits (he's yet to close his mouth once during a meal and offers a comprehensive range of chomping, slurping and gulping noises) and semi-pornographic comic book style illustrations he's done and pinned around his desk, giving it the look of teenage-boy-meets-Hyde-Park-flasher.

As a case study of a Londoner, he's an interesting specimen. He sounds like someone who just stepped off the set of a Guy Ritchie film and would probably lay claim to knowing some of the genuine geezer-types Ritchie loves to bring to life on the screen. He is a proud son of East London, speaks with the classic inflections and drops "innit" onto the end of every second sentence. He turns up to work wearing silky tracksuit pants which announce his arrival long before he appears, the psht-psht noise acting more effectively than an air raid siren to clear whatever space he is approaching. Because once you get trapped by him, there is no escape. Snoopy, as one former colleague dubbed him, knows all the goings on in the office and has few greater pleasures than sharing them with victims - er, an audience. That his stories aren't always true is irrelevant to him. It wasn't so irrelevant to the person who got back from leave last year to find an inbox full of condolences about being made redundant; he hadn't been, but the panic attack almost made him go to the directors and resign instead.

When he's not discussing what may or may not be going on at work, he tells detailed stories about his home life. Mind you, none of us actually know the names of his wife and daughter, even if we do know an infinite number of other details. He always just describes them as "mar wahfe" or "m'dor-er". Read them out loud, it will help you figure it out. Dor-er is about 6, an intelligent pretty little girl who in no way takes after her father; I figure she'll outgrow him by age 10. Wahfe is a quiet Vietnamese woman, arguably married by mail order (or sold into slavery, depending on which version you listen to), who works hard keeping her family together. the only time she has ever been known to speak up was when Snoopy appeared to be straying with Screechy, the man-eating, drug addled office psychopath. Wahfe cornered Screechy and warned her in no uncertain terms to keep away from Snoopy. Unfortunately, the person she should have been talking to was her husband. Not that he would have listened to her, women being, in his mind at least, there for cooking, cleaning and serving.

The time he's been happiest was during and of the redundancy periods. He would loiter by the stairs going into the boardroom, where the meetings were held with the unfortunate ones, and then race to email the latest name around the office. The behaviour was enough to get him a warning from the board, but somehow he's clung to his job. We're all wondering what dirt he has on them, because so many people were let got when he stayed. Of course, the new streamlined office has given him fewer places to hide. Where once the only place you wouldn't find him was at his desk, now he has no excuse for wandering; there's nobody left for him to visit.

This is the man I now sit next to. I think I'll ask if I can go back to being a leper in the back room. The company was better out there.

The Importance of Being Idle

As I sat and waited for the cold that won't die to leave my body - contemplating leaving my body myself, just to escape the bloody thing - I did, well, nothing today. Largely due to the fact that every time I attempted to move, either I suffered from separation anxiety (my tissue box and I are besties at the moment) or I suffered from extreme white-hot rods of pain through my sinuses. Or maybe that was just the anxiety kicking extra hard. Given choice between idleness, anxiety or pain, I chose idleness.

It's amazing what your brain throws up when you have vaguely hypochondriac tendencies and are actually sick. I spent a good half hour this morning wondering what would happen if the sinus infection took the worst case scenario and did actually do what it has threatened before, leaving me bed ridden while it slowly turned my head to mush. I'm not generally given to end-of-world scenarios, so it was amusing to indulge in every little detail, particularly dwelling on the guilt that would afflict Flatmate L when she discovered that her slurs about me pulling a sicky were completely off-base. I was interrupted by a phone call from her, wondering why I wasn't answering my work email address, and being cheered up no end by the observation, "Didn't you have Friday off as well? They're going to sack you." Thank you for the mood enhancer.

So, with my mind back at work, if not my body, I drifted to other thoughts, carefully lying still and watching Top Gear on BBC iPlayer (why does everything have to have an 'i' in it now? Even the electric car that they guys on Top Gear made had an 'i' somewhere in the name they gave it. And why is is always lower case?) And somewhere along the way, I strayed into pondering one of the guys who sits on the floor below mine.

I've had plenty of time to observe him. He started not long after me and, on days when I'm only slightly late, rather than horribly, I follow him into the office and he holds the door for me. We bump into each other in the kitchen sometimes, too. It's not a big office, so it's hardly surprising, really. But what is a little strange is that I've never heard him speak. I'm fairly certain that he can - word would have passed around far more quickly if he was mute, given our office-wide love of talking about each other - he just doesn't. It's only recently that he's even acknowledged that he's holding the door open for another person, giving a gentle smile and looking somewhere in the vicinity of my knees. I don't have great knees. There's no reason to stare at them. Mind you, I have to admit that I find his ankles inordinately fascinating. And it's for no other reason than them being on show so regularly.

He's a tall man, with the stoop of those over six foot who are generally surrounded by shorter people. I always assumed that it was to make it easier to hear what people were saying. I know I always end up bent double with my shorter friends, and I'm not nearly as tall as him. The thinning hair on top of his head suggests that he's kind of outgrown it. It never seems to get any thinner, so I assume that's just the way it's always been. With blond hair, blue eyes and seemingly good dentistry by English standards, he's not a bad looking boy. That's kind of why I noticed him in the first place. He dresses fairly stylishly on casual days. Not being lucky enough to be on my new floor, where they hide the cretins they don't allow the clients to see, he's generally dressed in business clothes. Which are a whole other story to his casual gear.

It must be easy to dress most men for the office. A pair of black trousers which may or may not be part of a suit. A white shirt. A tie to give a bit of variation. There are less rules about what's appropriate for different occasions. Some seem to wear the same basics and just shuffle the ties around to different days. This guy is no exception in that area, but there is one part of his wardrobe that I think someone really needs to sit him down and talk to him about. His trousers.

Have you ever seen the old movies, things where Cary Grant or Walter Matthau had their trousers pulled up around their arm pits? Think the male equivalent of granny-undies, but much more obvious to the world. Combine that look with bad posture and long legs, and you've got something close to what I'm talking about. His ankles must have frozen on snow day earlier this year, but he never thinks to pull the waistband down to sit somewhere near his hips, giving his ankles the coverage I've got no doubt they crave. Sometimes I get a tingling in my hands as I see him, and itch to go and give a good tug to the legs. He's known for it among the girls of the office, who call him Harry-High-Pants and rarely know his actual name. For someone who seems to go to such great lengths to hide themselves away, he draws an awful lot of attention with his trousers.

His jeans, well they seem to fit. It makes me wonder if his mother buys his work clothes, and has never quite gotten used to the idea that her son is all growed up now. He does seem a little like the type to get the final bit of his toothpaste wiped away with the corner of Mum's apron just before he leaves for work, packed lunch in hand. His casual clothes, he picks for himself. He looks far more comfortable in them, that's for sure. I think I've seen him actually talking to someone when he was wearing his jeans and a checked shirt. The change in him was remarkable. Not quite Clarke Kent/Superman, but not far short.

So why have I just written so much about a guy at work who doesn't speak to me, whose mother may still be buying his clothes, and who makes me giggle? Chalk it up to too many fluffy romance books while I've been sick. The winning out of the pain over the tissues is hopefully a sign that I'm on the mend. Or that the antibiotics will be kicking in soon, at any rate. Until then, I'm doomed to schmaltz. I apologise in advance.

Nutty matters

The squirrel sat on the roof of the shed and looked at me, almost daring me to blink. Half asleep, I stared back before shaking myself out of my reverie. I moved to take out some bread. When I looked out the window again, the squirrel had moved. In the seconds I hadn't been looking, he - because it's almost always a he, in my mind - had darted from the shed to the brick fence that separated the two large gardens behind my building. In summer, he'd be camouflaged there but now, in the Autumn, he was still visible. He twitched his tail at me.

I weighed up opening the window and throwing out some of the nuts that we keep on the bench for Charlie and Lottie, our squirrel neighbours, but decided it would take too much time. Instead, I put my bread in the toaster and began to ready my other breakfast things. Yoghurt, juice, Vegemite.

The toast seemed to take forever. I moved back to the window, but the squirrel - Charlie, Lottie, or just a random visitor - had vanished. The toast popped and I sighed as I noticed that, yet again, the toaster had spat it out too soon. Instead of the crisp golden brown, it was white and patchy. That's what you get when you buy the £10 kettle-and-toaster combo, I guess.

The flat was quiet as I sat down at the kitchen table to eat my toast, book in hand. A movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. The squirrel was back, playing hide and seek with me, apparently. Either that or statues. As I turned back to my book, I heard childish voices in my head; "What's the time Mr Wolf?" Breakfast time, I answered them, chomping down on a soggy piece of toast and getting absorbed in my book. Twenty minutes later I looked up at the clock in a panic. I was late. Again.

I downed the last of my juice, rinsed my dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Standing over the sink, I noticed that the squirrel was back on the roof of the shed, almost at my eye level. He seemed to be laughing at my sudden haste. I made a snap decision. I was already late, so why not?

I wrenched the window open - it's a stretch to make it across the bench and still have enough leverage to manage the large, heavy sash; a stretch too far for the shorter Flatmate C. Opening the bag of nuts, I threw a few out one by one, watching them land in the leaf litter of the courtyard below. The squirrel looked at me and if he'd had eyebrows, he would have cocked one. Clearly, he was not to be bought off with nuts. I shrugged a shoulder and slammed the window closed again before dashing downstairs and into the bathroom for a lightning quick shower.

Later in the morning, I sat at my desk in the misery of a sore throat and ear ache. "Toughen up," came the email from Flatmate L. "It's all a question of mind over matter." Maybe she's right. Then again, maybe she's not. I wonder if the squirrel has eaten the nuts yet. It's tempting to head home and check, but instead I stay at my desk and throw back a couple of paracetamols. The throat and ear improve, but I'm still curious about the squirrel.

The Sighting

I think I had an out of blog experience yesterday, and there was a certain amount of coincidence involved. I was even more late than usual. It was Monday, after all, so allowances must be made. I stepped off the tube at Waterloo, intent only on not walking into any of the twits who were blocking the exit pathway. On a side note, why do people stand pressed up against the doors as they wait for them to open? There are people in the train who are waiting to get out; it’s far easier for everyone if you stand back and let them get through first, so why the hell do they insist on trying to be the first into an emptying train? Is it that they’re worried the people who wave the little plastic paddle and declare the train “ready to depart” aren’t going to notice the fifteen people clustered around the door nearest the entrance to the platform, through the yards of empty space further down where two sensible people have already boarded? So as I gracefully pirouetted my way through the ravening hordes like a rhinoceros on the charge, I spotted a vaguely familiar face.

Let me be clear here. I’m not certain that the person I saw was the person I thought it was. There was a resemblance to the photo of what I can only assume is him at the top of his blog, sure. But it was only a glimpse, we were both hurrying, and – have I missed any possible caveats, just in case it wasn’t him? Add them here if I have. I think I had a glimpse of none other than blogger-extraordinaire, Mr London Street.

I’ve never knowingly thought I saw a fellow blogger before. I’m sure, given the vast numbers of them out there, that I’ve passed them all unknowing. And I know, thanks to the lovely Veronica Lake, that I won’t be recognised myself. That and the fact that I have an audience of 5, two of whom I knew before they started reading. But to even think I saw someone I only know from their writing, well it was almost like glimpsing a celebrity. I pretend to be all cool about it – I’m not into celeb worship, I don’t read OK or any of those, I figure they’re just people – but whenever I glimpse someone whose work I’ve admired, whether they be an actor (Jude Law, Sainsburys, Finchley Rd, late last year; Damian Lewis, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, earlier this month) or a writer (well, I’ve never seen any of them in the flesh, to be honest, but I would love to), it gives a little buzz. It’s interesting to compare the reality with the image, if nothing else.

So it was even more interesting that, later the same day, MLS came out with this post, about meeting other bloggers in person. He provided elegant character sketches that give a sense of the people he writes about. I’d love to be able to, but all I can offer is that, if it was actually him, he wasn’t shoving his way into the train before I was out of it – high commendation indeed. It was just the briefest flash of possible recognition. And, in my defence, if it’s not him that I saw, well, his profile pic is quite small. And MLS? If it wasn’t you, I offer a response to this: it’s not the beard, it’s because you have a doppelganger out there somewhere.

The morning tap

This morning I woke up with a tap attached to my face. It was there in place of my nose, and it was dripping. Constantly. When it wasn’t dripping, it was tingling. Well, I suppose you get that when someone replaces your nose with a tap. It’s bound to feel a little funny. In this instance, the funny made me sneeze regularly. The tap has been there for a few mornings, recently. It seems to disappear before lunchtimes. It’s a morning tap, a spigot without an ‘off’ position. It’s visited me before.

During my school days – back before the dawn of time, or of the millennium at the very least – I struggled through mornings just as I do now, a wodge of tissues permanently at the ready and the constant threat that, if I ran out of them, I’d end up looking like a toddler with a cold. Mothers would come up to me, pinch my nose and demand that I ‘blow’. I lived in fear of morning assemblies, daunting ceremonies that always had an uplifting theme, designed to stir us on to ever greater heights, illustrated through stories of inspirational women and uplifting hymns. We were expected to sit silently through these events three times a week, not wriggling too much as we sat on the hard wooden floor, or being caught talking when we were deemed old enough to have a seat in the balcony of the school hall. Most of the girls had their blazer pockets stuffed, one with their hymn book, the other with various coping mechanisms – usually of the sweet, chocolate- or sugar-coated variety. I always carried things that might work well as nose plugs, should the need arise. I’d always assumed that it was something in the hall that triggered my - sorry, this is going be gross – river of snot, but it turns out it wasn’t. It’s the morning generally that does it.

I’m allergic to mornings. By lunchtime, it’s gone. It was always second period at school before I could breathe through my nose, before I could enunciate clearly and not sound like a rugby player who’d just been pinned on the bottom of the scrum by his head. Now, it clears by the time I’m at my desk and have cleared my email inbox – a time that, admittedly, gets later and later every day. And rather than a pocket full of tissues, I have a roll of toilet paper sitting on my desk. I’m all class.

The way I see it, some people are morning people, and some people aren’t. I clearly fall into the latter category. I would love to be able to bounce out of bed in the morning, doing my very best impersonation of Tigger, but I have long resigned myself to being a shambling incarnation of a crime scene photograph when I first arise. The tissue plugs up my nose probably don’t help the appearance.

I’m going to be forced to get my act together, though. Word came down from on high that I am to be at a new desk location by the end of the week. The moment will be put off as long as possible. As much as I want the company of other people, I enjoy the luxury of having nobody nearby to see just how late it is when I first plant my head on my desk and reach for the toilet paper. Sitting with other people, I’ll have to start functioning through the snot. At least there's no mothers handy to offer me a handkerchief.

Ladies who lunch

While I was putting together my cheese and toast sandwich today, I was suddenly hit by a memory. It was a hit, not a gentle reminder or anything so subtle. It was the cheese that did it. Or rather, the foil that the cheese was wrapped in. But in order to understand why foil-wrapped cheese could trigger a moment of vivid recall, I need to start way back in September, during my trip back to Melbourne for a few days.

It was Mum's birthday. I was jet lagged out of my mind, feeling the effects of a horrendous plane trip that had ended at midnight the night before. The flight was awful, not least because somewhere between Singapore and Sydney, or Sydney and Melbourne - I still can't narrow it any further than that - I lost not only the denim jacket that I'd been carrying, but also the scarf that was with it. Beyond that, there were delays, annoying people and a malfunctioning entertainment system. Another day on Qantas, essentially. But I digress.

The jet lag had left me a little silly by the time in the afternoon that we made it to Nana's house for the hello visit. After the usual welcome back conversations ('When will you be back for good?' 'Have you seen Anabelle yet?' 'When do you leave?' 'Have you got a boyfriend yet?' 'You should go on Farmer Wants a Wife.' 'I got served by a lovely boy in the supermarket. So helpful, he was. I thought of you. You should get his number.'), talk shifted to the dinner plans for the night. We were off to the Cross Keys, a local pub that used to have a somewhat seedy reputation but now does a half decent meal and, most importantly, has discount vouchers on the back of supermarket dockets. The gist seemed to be that Nana was all prepared for the dinner already.

It seems that the meal sizes at the Cross Keys aren't to Nana's liking, though. Too big, apparently.

"They give you two enormous pieces of fish," she told me, gesturing with her hands. She could have been the fisherman describing the one that got away, with a piece of fish as large as the one she demonstrated.

"One that size is too much." I agree with her. One piece of fish that large would see me through a week. But Nana, ever-resourceful and always known for such behaviour, went to her handbag and showed us her solution; she had a freezer bag and a couple of pieces of paper towel already stashed, ready and waiting to receive the extra piece of fish and as many chips as she didn't want to eat. She's always been known for loading up on dinner rolls from the table, but it seems she's been picking up bad habits from her friends in the day club. I feel sorry for the bus driver on their outings, a load of senior citizens coming back from some destination, each with a piece of battered fish concealed in a wedge of paper napkins in her handbag. The stench must be mind-numbing by the end of a two hour trip.

"The only trouble," she told me, "is that it all goes a bit pappy by the next day. After ***'s birthday the other week, it was a soggy mess when I pulled it out of the fridge."

You have to remember, I was jet lagged. I was feeling silly, and I was still adjusting to having to conceal my giggles. And I'm always a little bit of a smart arse - er, always helpful. So I offered a suggestion, a hint.

"You should take some foil, keep it crisp."

Her eyes light up like the flashers on a winning pokie machine. It's all she can do to keep from running to the kitchen and stuffing the roll of foil into her bag there and then. She manages to contain her excitement, somehow, and the rest of the visit goes off without a hitch. ('You should be saving.' 'You need to come back and settle down.' 'About as welcome as a red-headed step-child.')

Later that night, clustered around the family dinner table, I heard a rustling from the far end of the table, and suppressed giggles from the cousins and their partners lined up opposite me.

"Was that foil?" demanded the newest addition to the family group, the girlfriend of a cousin. She sounded incredulous. I looked down the length of the table and there sat Nana, forcing the zip of her handbag closed over a clearly bulging foil-wrapped parcel. She looked up at me and beamed. I don't think I've ever made her as happy before in my entire life.

When I saw her again a couple of days later, she was still beaming.

"That was a lovely bit of fish I got from the Cross Keys. It stayed all crispy. I'll have to tell Mary to keep a bit of foil in her bag."

Whatever Anonymous

I have a flatmate in need of an intervention. Maybe both of them do. Either that, or it’s time I got out and got a life. They’re both in extreme states right now, brought about by their own foolish actions. They each have a dependency situation that is coming to a head and will cause them pain in the not too distant future. Their uppers of choice vary, but the result is still the same: they’re both exhausted, and unable to stop themselves from going back for more.

Take L, as the first example. She’s just discovered what I can only call the joys of a night out drinking, at the age of 35. It was never going to end well, really. For 30 years barely a drop of alcohol passed her lips. By all accounts, her mother virtually insisted that she have a drink of some sort at her 21st birthday party; everyone knew better than to expect her to be ‘merry’ by the time her 30th rolled around. Now here we are, five years later, and she has come under the influence of her work friends who are the typical residents of London – verging on liver failure thanks to the lifestyle that is expected of all and sundry in the city and its surrounds. She goes out for dinner during the week, like this week and, because her tolerance is so low and she never learnt the coping tools that the rest of us picked up when we were young enough not to suffer from hang overs, she gets drunk. She never believed me that she was feeling the effects of alcohol, until recently. She still insists, the morning after, that she’s not drunk. She’s just tired, dehydrated, has a headache. But the last couple of sessions have seen her bleary eyed and chugging water. My personal favourite was the night she nearly fell down the stairs, giggling as she saved herself.

Part of the reason it hits her so hard, though, is the reason she needs an intervention. The woman doesn’t sleep. She insists that the smallest thing wakes her up, that it always has. But lately her exhaustion has been so deep that I’ve been able to bang around the flat at 3 a.m. and not disturb her. Her four hours of sleep are deep, but not enough to replenish her. I spent a fortnight of barely sleeping in the lead up to the end of this semester, studying until the wee sma’s, culminating in a memorable night of 2 hours sleep. I still looked more alert and awake than she did. I was the one pulling her back from stepping out in front of cars, in spite of being so exhausted myself that I was mainlining caffeine and hallucinating that walls were rippling. Maybe she has that problem too. Maybe that explains why she walks into the walls to often I've started comparing her to the ball in a pinball machine. I’m tempted to tie her to her bed and force her to sleep, because she won’t stop driving herself and I’m getting the feeling that collapse is imminent.

C has a slightly different problem. Her addiction is to Shoreditch. It’s like a vortex, sucking her in a couple of nights a week. The eye of the storm is her boyfriend, a cheerful Irishman who lives up to the reputation of his countrymen for putting away booze. C, in contrast, is a petite Japanese girl with a lower tolerance for it than even L. I’ve seen her literally legless, before, being carried out of a party with the kind of jelly legs that are usually seen in cartoons when someone has been hit over the head with an anvil. She staggered in at 4 a.m. this morning and woke with red eyes, exhausted. She’s off out again tonight, and probably tomorrow as well. Right now, I think she’s single-handedly keeping Nurofen in business. Just like an alcoholic, she goes to Shoreditch for one or two, planning on hitting just the one bar. She emerges hours later having done the rounds of any number of haunts, but few clear memories of which ones. It’s not even that she’s drinking too much – she’s sworn off mojitos, now – it’s more that she’s also just not sleeping. In her case, the intervention would be removal from her boyfriend, the enabler to end all enablers given that he works in Shoreditch. He leads her into the Twilight Zone of its bars, and they emerge later having lost several hours without knowing where.

Her intervention is coming though, whether she wants it or not. The boy is off to Thailand very soon, and they won’t be seeing each other again until Christmas, when they meet at her family’s place in Indonesia. Her liver will have time to regenerate, if it's given the chance. But December is party month. It won’t have a hope.

And then there’s me. I probably need my own intervention right now. It’s to pry me away from the flat. I’ve got an invitation to the party C will be at tonight. It’s the 30th birthday of a mutual friend. There will be loads of people there, it’s an 80s themed dress up. And I should go. I know I should. But somehow, I just can’t muster the enthusiasm to go and be the sober person in the room. And I can’t bring myself to go and spend my hard earned on booze. I’m becoming a stick in the mud. And what’s worse, I like it. Someone get a crow bar and pry my fingers loose from the door frame. It’s the only way to get me out and about tonight.

From the Old School House

Imagine an old school house. Lofty ceilings, hard surfaces and a fairly large space that would once have been crammed with grimy little critters of all ages; this is south London, after all, a place where smog and smut would have dominated the air, rather than just the brains and mouths of certain locals. There’s another floor above, where yet more urchins would have been packed literally to the rafters. There are windows letting natural light flood in, but they are too high to allow for any view that doesn’t involve pigeons perched on drain pipes. The birds always seem to be mating; I've stared at them a lot. Through the window, open to negate the stifling central heating, wafts the slightly stomach turning smell of a fish and chip shop that hasn’t changed its oil in far too long.

White painted walls, bars on the windows. It was an institution of learning, but it seems to have a much harsher purpose now. The swearing of the children who like to get up to who knows – or really wants to know – what in the alley beside the building adds to the feeling of being in some netherworld, the kind only seen by many in Guy Ritchie films and the estate sections of The Bill. But it’s not a movie set. It’s my office, the place I spend a depressing amount of time.

At one end, by the door that leads through to the stairs and the toilets, sit two people. In theory they sit there, anyway. In reality, they have their desks there as a base for the moments when they’re not on site, somewhere to put their coats while they have meetings, a phone to store their messages, a computer to write instructions for the builders. They’re not there very often. Then there’s a gap, not quite ten metres, but more than five and feeling like the Sahara desert of office space - vast, unfathomable, uncrossable. It’s been filled over the past few months. Detritus from other people’s desks has made its way down here; empty desks are magnets for this kind of thing in an office still adrift with paper and samples of stone, tiles, carpets, tap fittings. There’s even a broken photocopier in there. It’s wasteland, the car wreckers yard of the office.

I sit on the other side of it, a solitary figure with as much space again behind me. All I have to keep me company, most of the time, is my ipod, my computer, a skeletal dodo and a fluffy flamingo pen left behind by the occupant of the next desk when she was made redundant. And the randy pigeons on the rooftops outside. A telephone list with more names crossed out than not is held to the partition behind the computer screen with a piece of yellowing sticky tape. It’s a lonely old existence, some days. On others, there’s so much foot traffic going from the stairs to the kitchen, which opens off a corridor on my side of the room, or to the print area behind me, that I never get a chance to indulge what I’m doing now. You never know who is going to stop for a chat on their way through, surreptitiously checking your screen to see if you’re working on a juicier project than they are. In a world where two thirds of the people you know have been made redundant, you’re always on the look out for the project that looks like its going to last. You don’t want to be the person left clinging to the wreckage when the client gets the jitters about the state of the market and pulls the rug out from under you. Because you won’t have the wreckage for long before it – and your job – is snatched away from you.

L was bitching the other night about not having had a pay rise in the last six months. She wondered why I nearly bit her head off. She’s not familiar with the empty office, the fear, the boredom of not even being able to afford to buy the postage for your Christmas presents, let alone the presents themselves.

A Little Bit of Something

It happened again this morning. I was running late. That’s not what happened again, it seems to happen pretty much every morning, so I hardly ever comment on it these days. No, it was while I was bustling to the tube that it happened. A short anorexic girl out for a jog went by me and nearly took me out.

I’m not small. In fact, there is no dimension attached to me that could possibly be classed as small, except for my attention span, which is too tiny to measure. I shouldn’t be difficult to see coming. I was wearing a blue coat and a pink/purple/blue striped hat. I have big hair. I should have been clearly visible, especially from behind. I wasn’t walking up the middle of the footpath, but, rather considerately, I thought, was off to one side. There was nobody coming the other way. But still Little Miss These-Lycra-Leggings-Are-Flapping-Loose-At-My-Bum felt it necessary to try to cut between me and the brick wall I was walking beside, and in the process nearly overturned me. And it’s the second day in a row she’s done it. Being bumped into by her is like having a bag of rulers thrown at your back; she’s all sharp angles with, quite literally, no padding. The only reason she didn’t end up on her arse herself was that there was nothing of her to bounce off me. Kind of like a feather doesn’t really bounce off things as it falls to the ground, it just slightly alters its course, she was able to keep her feet.

But aggressive vertically challenged folk have been out in force of late. Last night I had one standing so close behind me on an escalator that her face must have been getting hit by the bag I had slung over my shoulder. Every time she breathed, I could feel some part of her against my thighs. She would have climbed the stairs, I’m sure, but for the stream of other midgets passing on the left. One of these bolted past at such speed that I was nearly sucked into her slipstream as I stepped off the top. I watched her weave through the crowd when I was caught in a lull, waiting for some moron to find their oyster card while they were at the gates. I couldn’t see her, she was too low down, but I could see the ripple of consternation her passing caused like wind through a field of wheat. It was around about then that I put together my theory about why shorter people are often so much more aggressive in crowd situations than taller ones. The taller ones can see the impact their movement has on the people around them. They can often see that by jostling the person next to them, they bump them into another person, and the contact travels like a wave out from the source. Shorties, on the other hand, barrel through hordes of people only able to see the ones they elbow out of the way – and sometimes it seems that they don’t even see them – until somewhere, Ashton Kutcher blacks out or a there's a hurricane in Texas. I think it’s time I tested out my own version of the butterfly effect though; the next stunted excuse for an adult who sideswipes me and nearly knocks me over because they hit me below my centre of gravity? Yeah, I might just land on them. We’ll see what that does to the butterfly.

*Apologies to all my short friends. You know I don’t mean you. None of you have knocked me over yet. But be warned, if you do…

Dial M for...

I was away from my desk when my mobile rang. I didn't hear it - nobody would, since it's switched to silent during work hours. The only sign of any activity, when I got back to my desk - was the flashing light at the centre of the keypad and a little arrow showing on the screen. There's something about a missed call. Until the caller details come up on the screen, it could be anybody. It's a frisson of excitement in an otherwise mundane and boring day. But not today. Today, the caller details simply say 'Private'. There is no symbol in the top right of the screen to suggest that they, whoever they may have been, left a message. Excitement turns quickly to frustration, annoyance.

Why call at all, if they will not leave a message?

I assume it is a friend whose office number always comes up as private, then go back to work as I wait for a reply to my email asking what she wanted. But when it comes half an hour later, 30 minutes of distraction and futile attempts to keep working, to not pick up my phone and play with the buttons in hopes of finding out who it was, it is a denial; she didn't call me.

I log into various webmail accounts, hoping against hope that whoever it was has simply decided to email me instead. But no. There is no email waiting in either gmail account, nor is hotmail showing any news. Whoever it is, they have not left me a message anywhere.

Which means that it is not the publishing company I applied to for a job last week. It is not somebody wanting my services as a seamstress, giving me the cash to survive this month in a little more comfort. Nobody was actually desperate to contact me. And suddenly, I feel unloved instead of anxious. Melancholy.

It's cold and grey outside today. Meteorologists are forecasting fog overnight. And I'm surrounded by the over-warm fug of central heating, struggling to stay awake. I wish the call had come a few minutes earlier, a few minutes later, when I was sitting beside the phone. Anything to relieve the dull routine, the frustration of unsatisfied curiosity.

Update: I have identified my mystery caller. It was no mystery. It was the mobile phone carrier that I left earlier this year, attempting to win my custom back. They called again this afternoon, having called twice yesterday as well. I almost wish I'd never found out.

The Winter Coat

Winter is definitely upon us. The days are noticeably shorter, with stick figure shadows like children’s drawings attached to our feet by lunchtime. The trees shrugged off their leaves over the course of a couple of days last week, leaving a treacherous, slippery sludge on footpaths after it rained on Friday. Until the rain it looked pretty, tempting me into turning into a six year old again and kicking my way through the drifts for the joy of the sound and colour. I didn’t, but only because, in the grown up land I inhabit, I was perpetually rushing around, always late for whatever my next appointment was.

I had to dig out my longer winter coat today as well. The knee length black number that I bought with the winnings of my one and only soccer bet. Thank you, Tim Cahill, for keeping me warm for three years by being the first to score against Arsenal way back in 2006. I was looking the coat over before putting it on this morning and I noticed that the elbows are looking decidedly worn. I don’t think it’s going to see me through another winter after this. It will be added to the list of things I will be leaving behind when I leave London. And I’ll miss it; it features prominently in my winter travel photos, the few occasions that I have let myself appear in them. There I am, wrapped up against the cold with varying hats, gloves, scarves, and my trusty black, double-breasted, knee-length coat, always looking more stylish than any other coat I’ve managed to find. With the coat will vanish something of my self image.

Of course it saw less wear last winter than before. The second round of Heathrow injection kicked in to make it a little too snug to wear with enough layers underneath it. This year it seems to be more snug, but I’m fairly certain that it’s just me. If it was really any more snug than it was last year, the bottom button wouldn’t do up, rather than just straining ever so slightly. But whatever its fit, whatever the reason, it is gradually inching closer to the charity shop haul at the end of my London life.

It sounds like I have written that as a metaphor for my London life; it’s really not. It’s just an ode to a coat that has seen me through a lot. I could write a similar tribute to my boots, but they can’t handle the pace and need to be re-heeled at the beginning of every winter. The coat, in contrast, something that never truly gets packed away in a place like London, just needs a quick brush and it’s ready for service. It might be poetic to link living in London with a tired, worn out piece of clothing that no longer fits me properly. Hell, I’d think I was pretty darned clever if I could do that and make it work. But at the end of the day? It’s just a coat. There’s a new one in a shop out there waiting for me to have the right combination of time and money to find it. At the moment, it’s going to be waiting until kingdom come, but I know it’s out there somewhere. I just need to get off my butt and find it. In the mean time, my old faithful will have to serve. And do it well, given that we’re headed into the first week of temperature not reaching double figures this week.

I can’t tell if it’s the beginning of Christmas, or then end of the year. Either way, there is a touch of melancholy to the season for me. It’s my last full year in London, my last northern hemisphere winter. There are reasons to look back and reasons to look forward. I think I’ll focus on the forward, today.