Give Peas A Chance

I may have caused some confusion...

Imagine your day's work starts long before dawn. Imagine wrestling your stubborn, hungry, bad-tempered donkey into harness and cart. Imagine joining a caravan of motley vehicles - skeletal horses, rusted pick-ups, warped bicycles and weaving your weary way into the streets of Cairo, Egypt. You ache from yesterday - it was backbreaking. You're hungry. You're always hungry. The streets are stinking and the sun hasn't even come up yet.

Saturday 26th May 2007:

It is 3am and I am still awake. Not impressed. Have first of 3 breakfasts. Attempt to read myself to sleep. Futile. Finish book at 5am, wonder how exhaustion can't have got the better of me. Ants still in my proverbial pants, I go out for a run, flipping my iPod onto 'shuffle' (today is officially Random Day OUt 2007). Contemplate that I may have seen the best of the weather - clouds are gathering over the mucky, churning Thames and ducks are cackling at the prospect of rain.

Nevermind the tyrannies of CCTV, I'm an inveterate People Watcher. No, I'm not nosey... I just can't help myself! I love to watch humans doing their day-to-day stuff in their natural environment. Today I was doing just that, when I saw something funny.

So a guy comes and sits down on a step next to me at the bus stop. He's laden with carrier bags and he puts them down before his feet. As we wait for our bus, in silence he gets an item out of his shopping. A cucumber portion

I was on a train today, coming back into London. I had a perfectly good book with me, but I'd reached a sort of draggy bit and my attention wandered. On the seat next to me was a popular women's magazine 'Red'... this was surely the solution to my crappy attention span! It was also the catalyst for the following rant. I am not a natural ranter. I am generally of a sunny dispostion, but this put the freakers on me BIG STYLE! I also have a Beethoven concerto on in the background and he's crashing around as only the deafest, most disillusioned of composers knows how. This is not helping!

Letting you into a little secret...

When I feel a bit too much like I have two feet firmly planted on the earth and God is way way way up there, I have a way to make myself feel that little bit closer.

Now, there's something I do every morning and evening as a kind of ritual. It's something that most of you girls will do, and some of the well-trained guys. I wash my face and slap on some moisturiser. This is in the name of:

a. Preventing total dessication of my countenance by the elements
b. A futile gesture to the inevitability of the ageing process, doomed as I am.

However, recently this simple action has taken on a whole new dimension, and has given me (would you believe it!?) a spiritual kick up the backside.

"How?" I hear you clamour...

So my long-time friend and sparring partner Mr Bastable wants to hear 5 things about me that he doesn’t already know. This is difficult, as being best friends with his wife kind of has me at a disadvantage - she knows me rather too well, I fear so he knows these things by proxy!

Apparently Richard Dawkins and friends have termed this kind of information-sharing phenomenon a ‘meme’ - it’s a word they created when talking about social evolution theory to describe a ‘pocket of information’ passed between generations. Basically it’s how urban legends start, and how they stay alive (thanks Andy for educating me there!)

Today I was watching two girls of around five years old walking home along the river.

Today was so gorgeous! And there I was stuck in work for the first day in 12. Humph. Good to be back, but I did want to spend so much of the day with my nose pressed to the window like one of those Garfield toys in a car window, better still - outside. Alas - I work 8am till 8.30pm. So I resigned myself to the fate of adulthood & launched myself into the day with aplomb. I was buzzing.

But there I was, bowling through it, laughing & joking with my friends, when everything suddenly exploded, as it has a nasty habit of doing in my line of work.