All the missing people are in ‘Pret a Manger’
I knew yer one behind the counter would ask if I wanted anything else in that automated, corporate tone, so I beat her to the punch and said “can I have an almond croissant and nothing else please!?”
And she said “Sure, would you like anything else?”… I should have asked her again for the almond croissant but she would have asked me if I wanted anything else and we would have gone round and round and round in circles and I might never have come out of there again…
Maybe that’s where all the missing people go; ‘Can I have an almond croissant please and nothing else?’ ‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’, ‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’….
I got some energy for 2010…
There must be something fundamentally wrong with me; as a human being and I put on this planet for just a flicker of a moment and I behave like this…
There was I, all alone on the top deck of a double decker bus, on new years eve afternoon. I sat in the very front seat when all of a sudden a friendly girl, just a few years older than me, with an accent hard to define, sat in the other front seat opposite me.
She smiled at me as she took her seat and I half smiled back. When she settled into her seat, she kinda leaned over and said “this is beautiful isn’t it?” she could hardly contain her excitement… It kinda took me by surprise.
I looked out and saw grey buildings towering over me, traffic everywhere, people zig-zaging on the pavement. I tried to see the beauty, I replied “its a nice view from up here”, she agreed and her whole persona was poised for a fully fledged conversation. It was at that point, I reached in to my bag and pulled out my Ipod…
I could feel her watching me and I continued to plug my ears despite this innate feeling that it was the most ignorant, ugly thing any human could do in a moment like that.
With my ipod clogging up my ears, I couldn’t shake off this feeling of self disgust, so i put my ipod away and angled for a chin wag.
By that time she had a magazine open on her lap; I noticed it was called “voyage”.
I broke the ice and we had a loose, on & off chat for the duration of the journey across London. She was so excited to be here and had only just arrived from Paris. I told her that I too felt like that when I first came here, but now I’m sort of like a horse with blinders;
She said she feels that way about Paris. We agreed that things always look better when you’re just passing through… and I said “Yep, a rolling stone gathers no moss…”
I then thought to myself how cool it would be to be a rolling stone again, a wanderer, just roaming around from place to place and settling for a while, then moving off when the time felt right.
Imagine if we just followed our every whim and we never settled down… Like if I just went home now, packed my bags and walked out on all that’s familiar and just headed off, just headed off and just went where ever the wind blew me…
Anyway, she got off the bus when we got down south of the river and I said, “Happy new year to you”. She said it to me too. I said I hope its a good one and I really did mean it. She told me that it has already got off to a great start as she has just received the best news ever. She was beaming. I said I hope some of that energy passes over onto me, she raised her two hands over me in jest and said, “I’ll give you some of that energy now!”…
We both laughed and that was the end of our encounter.
I am kind of excited about 2010 now and waiting for my good news…
An aborted meeting…
I was in Starbucks this afternoon to fulfill an internal hankering for a Latte.
Standing behind me in the queue was a peculiar man with a pair of interesting looking Winkle Pickers. They were similiar to these ones:
He looked like he was from another era.
He also wore tweed pedal pushers and had a handle bar mustache.
We collected our coffees at the same time and brought them over to the special counter where you put your sugar in your coffee and get those wooden poky things to stir it with.
We stood side by side and did our business; tearing sugar sachets, pulling out napkins, licking foam from the stirring sticks and readjusting our coffee lids.
All of a sudden I felt compelled to turn to him and ask:
“Do you think we will ever stand side by side again?”…
A building gets dressed…
Think about your life in the last twelve months.
Now look at the first twelve months in the life of this building.
What a difference a year makes…
(I won’t bore you with the other 361 photos!)
London’s skyline is ever changing…
Strange thing spotted in the Park…
On a shortcut through the Park yesterday, I stumbled upon this…
Initially I got a fright, but was relieved it wasn’t moving.
Does anyone know what the hell this is all about?
Adventure at Sainsbury’s and mean Irish man…
Went grocery shopping last night, walked down to Sainsbury’s with the trolley, it was a lovely evening for it. The trolley fits really nicely under the Sainsbury’s Shopping trolley too. See the trolley’s there on the right hand side?
They’re the ‘half measure’ trolley’s. Well those are the ones that our shopping trolley fits under. It stores it out of the way so you don’ t have to be carrying it around while you are shopping. Not many people know of this. People watched me store it under there too and you could see that they were well impressed with my finding such a storage space for it.
I went over to the stack of trolley’s anyway, I had a pound coin in my hand.
There was a man putting his back and he was kinda loitering there for longer than it takes.
He turned to me in a gentlemanly manner and said something along the lines of “Here you go… here is a trolley for you” I was feeling a bit dozy and said ”Oh right, so how does this work, I give you the pound and you give me the trolley” and he said “you can give it to me for 50 pence if you like as it’s second hand” I laughed then and he smiled at me, I felt a connection with the man, as he too was Irish.
I looked at him as he walked away across the zebra crossing and out of my life.
I just kind of studied him for a split second, the way you do when you have an interaction with someone for the first time, you kinda take them in, don’t ya? You kinda make a judgement about them based on the way the hold themselves in their skin, their clothes, their walk and their shoes… you can tell a whole lot by someone’s choice of shoes.
I snapped out of that anyway and got on with my grocery shopping. I bought this lot with my money:
What you don’t see clearly in the above picture is my little chocolate collection for the week:
I have turned into a terrible chocolate snob altogether. I spent £9.00 on the chocolate bars in the photograph above. I never tasted any of them before and wanted to try them out.
I finished my shopping anyway and paid for what i bought.
When i tried to return the trolley to the stack I discovered that the pound coin was jammed in there and it wouldn’t let me take it out. I swear to God, i was cursing that man. What a sneak…
When I looked back in hindsight, I remembered that he was attempting to take his coin out of the slot before i came along. Way down deep inside the bowels of my psyche, there was a part of me that twigged it too, but I never kind of allowed that feeling to surface. I guess it was an instinct.
He had a sneaky way about him too and he palmed it off on me, that gammy trolley. He ripped me off… So out of principal, I decided to queue up at Customer Services to get my pound back. I was waiting in line for about twenty minutes. For all of those twenty minutes I was seething. I was thinking evil thoughts about that man and was also thinking how strange it was that i walked into that situation all knowing. There was a part of me that knew exactly what was happening… and that intrigued me.
There was a Greek lady with a moustache in the queue in front of me.
She turned around and we had a brief two way conversation about city life and she said she has been living next door to the same neighbours for twenty five years and she doesn’t know them and in Greece it isn’t like that. The conversation then went into a one-way conversation and I just kept saying “yeah… yeah…. yeah….” but couldn’t tell you what she was saying, she was kinda hard to understand anyway.
I wasn’t in the mood for chit chat. I just wanted my pound back…
Create your own bubble…
To survive happily in London you have to create your own bubble and then maintain it so no one can penetrate it.
When you’re in your own bubble, no one can annoy you or stress you out. Ipods, Blackberries and Electronic Devices such as these are great for building up bubble walls. Closing your eyes in public also thickens the walls of your bubble, but only do this whilst sitting on the tube or bus. Bubbles tend to get burst if you try this whilst in the pub or walking down the street because you attract unnecessary attention to yourself or you may have an accident.
Bubbles are designed to float, they should be light and airy and full of dreamy thoughts and fluffy feelings…
Bad Luck & Allah…
Once my driving instructor told me that she was teaching this very holy Muslim girl how to drive. When it came to do her test, she got the day off work and went to the test centre only to be told that her test was cancelled. She was completely unphased by it.
The Driving Instructor said “Jeez that’s an awful pain it was cancelled isn’t it?” and she said “Nah, It’s what Allah wanted”…
That story always stuck with me for some reason…
It’s quite a calm way to think… Like anytime anything went wrong or didn’t go ‘my way’, I could just say “Allah wants it that way…”
Well I hope Allah wants what I want… Ay there’s the rub, methinks…
Hmmmm….
London by Twilight…
I had the most glorious morning so far… I hopped on my bike at an almerciful hour and proceeded to cycle through the crack a dawn and out the other side and into the day.
Cycling through London at that hour is like going on a little adventure, there’s something magical about the moment before the crack a dawn I tellya.
Anyway, I was going to put a bag a rubbish in the wheelie bin before I left, when I stopped in my tracks cuz there was a massive spider and he had created a huge web in between me and the bins (that reminds me, I dreamt of a furry kinda half-animal-half-bumblebee thing getting trapped in a cobweb last night, and I freed him using a ruler anyway, that’s beside the point) so I didn’t bother putting out the rubbish for two reasons, one being that his web was so impressive, it was a mansion of a web, I would hate to be the one to tear it to pieces by walking through it. The second reason is because I am terrified of spiders and wouldn’t risk the leggy fella climbing on top of me…
So I threw the bag a rubbish in the front door and put my leg over the bike and zoomed off into the day. I have been leaving at the same time each morning and isn’t familiarity a great thing cuz there was a couple of mornings this week where I had more than one encounter with the same animal on my route to work. A black Cat crossed my path three times this week, in the exact same spot and the exact same time! I warned him out loud this morning to watch himself on the road; I really would hate to see some black cat pizza concoction on the road when I come back that same route on Monday.
I also have met a fox crossing the road in front of me, again, the same spot at the same time, I just know it was the same fella… y’know when you just know, dontcha…
I dingled my bell at the fox. I did that cuz I kinda thought that would keep him on his guard and make him feel like I am the enemy. The foxes are getting too relaxed around people… they will get beaten up if they continue like this so I wanted to keep him on his toes (claws). I secretly liked him though, he was so cute.
I flew down the hill at breakneck speed after my encounter with the fox, it was lovely and no car or no person or anything in my way, I thought of this line from Patrick Kavanagh’s Poem:
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom. I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.
When it’s like that I like to cycle in the middle of the road. It’s such an exhilarating experience, cycling a bike… not all the time, but every so often I have moments where everything is just right… and I think I have one over all the people in the bus. Because of this feeling, I had a huge urge to wave at people but there wasn’t anyone in any of the buses that passed by so I went to work bursting with unspent waves.
Anyway, when I got to the path along the Thames, my morning peaked… cuz the sky and the view across the river was just breathtaking I had to stop and take a photo for you…
