The Time of My Life

Standing outside the Slaughtered Lamb a drunk San Franciscan to whom I had lent a lighter invited me to her home town for a holiday.

"What brought you to London?" I didn't particularly want to know but since we would be holidaying together I felt it only polite to ask.

"Well" She replied "I was working...and now...well, I'm kind of here illegally." She said with bravado. What if I was an immigration officer?

"Cool" I replied, I was not sure if I thought this was cool, I mean I didn't think it was uncool, I didn't really have an opinion. "Where were you working before you became an enemy of the state?"

"In a cupcake shop. But I want to study Human Rights at the London School of Economics."
She said earnestly.

"I work for Amnesty." And with that and without any further questions as to the nature of my role or indeed my personality she then begun to introduce me-undeservedly- to her friends as her 'hero'

I then spent a good ten minutes high fiving her once bespectacled friend Max having stolen his glasses. This made the process of high fiving harder because he couldn't see without his glasses and I couldn't see with them. Then after one rather elaborate hi five his glasses were knocked from my face on to the floor and were subsequently repatriated.

Just as we all discussed the finer points of my heroism a man ran out of the pub door.

"Oh my God!" He exclaimed in a slightly comic camp foreign accent "I've just had the time of my life downstairs!"

He was a friend of Max and the San Franciscan. "What happens downstairs?" We asked in unison.

He looked at us as if it was self evident
" Why, it's where people go to have the time of their life of course!" He gushed, still buzzing from having the time of his life.

"Why, it's where people go to have the time of their life of course!" I repeated mimicking his slightly comic camp foreign accent.


He looked down at me with narrowed eyes and said
"Ok, that was a bit racist, but that's ok because I've just had the time of my life."

"This is my friend Nicoli" said the San Franciscan  "He's Greek"
He nodded at me. And then he ran down the road as fast as he could.

Walking

I've taken to walking around the streets of London and it has come to my attention that London is one giant pinball machine and I am the ball baring. 

I thought it was because I am small and because people are rude that I seem to spend my time bouncing off  people, walls and door ways but now I realise that obviously somebody in a parallel universe is playing London-themed pin ball. Every time I get barged, pushed, nudged or banged on the head by a crazy women with a fake Louis Vuitton bag it is not the carelessness of others but the design of a sadistic pinball addict somewhere other than here. 

I hate pinball and shall now boycott it on humanitarian grounds.

Nausea on the Northern Line

At present I mostly get the bus, hence the title of this blog but sometimes I venture underground and today I got the Northern Line from London Bridge, it was filled with Polish people, I think they were Polish, there were lots of them and they seemed quite happy.

My mood had been buoyed by the fact that I had seen probably the world's most amazing puppy. He was gadding about, attempting to eat his lead and looking happy (perhaps he was Polish). His owner walked beside him, glowing with pride as she watched the hearts of her fellow commuters melt into their collective metaphorical briefcase (I say metaphorical errouneously, because actually it was literal, all the commuters carried one giant briefcase with their days work all mixed up together so that on opening it they found, to their dismay, that there was in fact no order to the world and so submitted to chaos and half baked dreams of one day owning a small Polish puppy). I digress.

So I got on the High Barnet branch and browsed the Metro and became briefly enamoured by multi gold medal winning swimmer Michael Phelps -did you know that he's arm span is longer than his height- I wonder if it would hurt if he hugged me and also would his arms go round twice? The girl to my left elbowed me. I glared at her; she had a Roman nose and liked to talk to her friend about club night listings, tonight they will go to an electro-clash and house night in Kings Cross, I know because she was shouting, she may have been Polish.

Hung-over, was I. An underground train can sometimes be good for a hangover, so dark and miserable is it, but no so today because today I felt as if the train was sinking. Just as the girl on my left had made the decision to enjoy an evening of House music I noticed some nose hairs sitting on my right. The hair came not from the nostrils, but from the bridge of the nose, this is a common enough occurrence but most people trim them.

He was staring at me not in that surreptitious, ‘I’m staring at you, but you're staring at me too and this is allowed because this is a municipal transportation system’ way. No, this was just staring in the ‘not allowed regardless of the public nature of my journey’ kind of way. Even more off putting was the fact that because he was sitting next to me it meant that he had to turn a full 90 degrees to do so. Even more off putting than that was the stench, the putrid fragrance that came, perhaps from the nose hairs themselves, perhaps from his jacket but more probably from his trousers. For me what is worse than an awful smell is the thought of the awful smell; how it got there? how long had it been there? could he smell it? Then I gagged for several seconds. I think he saw me retch. At the next stop I moved seats and sat at the other end of the carriage.

On taking my new found seat I was greeted by the oomptcha oomptcha sound from the head phones of the man opposite me. He wore round dark glasses, a Motorhead hoody which had a picture of a skull with tusks on it-it looked like an angry dead walrus- and his hair was mousy brown, long and lank and sat veil-like across his pasty forlorn face. He was wearing rather smart shorts, which was odd. He got off the train at Camden Town. Obviously.