T-Shirts, Pee and Tennis

A quick blog this week. Alas, time and eyesight is short.

Time is limited because I’ve left writing this until Tuesday and I’ve spent most of the morning delivering a large box load of DVDs to a primary school in Essex (don’t ask) and my eyesight is failing because I think I might have burnt out my retinas.

Before I went to Essex, before the parcel force man tried to deliver the large box of DVDs to next door, before I played avoid the policeman as I attempted to pass my car off as a double-decker bus whilst dropping Beck off at Lewisham station I did some proper work.

When we rejigged the upstairs, switching the bedroom and the office-studio around, we realised that (of course) the old office-studio, now the bedroom, didn’t have any curtains. Fortunately the window was the same size as one of the two windows in the old BEDroom, the new office-studio, so we just took the blind down and moved it across.

“I’ll make some nice curtains for the bedroom,” Beck said as I attempted to shoulder-barge the bed through the, frankly, too small doorway.

Now, the window we removed the blind from is the window my desk is positioned in front of. What I hadn’t realised, mainly because of the perpetual greyness of the past six weeks, and partly because, well I’m a berk, is that the sun rises around the front of the house.

Pretty much directly opposite the window I’m now facing.

So, as the temperature soars and the sunlight strength increases in some appropriate metaphorical fashion that I’m too short of time to actually think of, I sit staring straight at the big, burning ball of flame that keeps us all alive.

Now, because I’m stubborn, or possibly just stupid, I didn’t moved. I didn’t go downstairs to work at the table. No, I stuck it out. We made the BEDroom the office-studio so as we could have permanent workspace and not spill pasta sauce on final proofs of work and, by God, I’m was going to use it.

Of course I’ve spent the afternoon feeling slightly nauseous and with a throbbing headache that feels like someone’s picking at the nerve-ends of my eyeballs with a toothpick.

It probably would have been easier to go downstairs.

Anyway, below are three moments from the past week that I intended to weave into some sort of narrative, but as looking at the computer screen hurts this is all you’re going to get:

1) Walking through the streets of Brockley the other day I saw, coming out of the post-office, a youngish Mum leading a junior-school age boy by the hand.

“Ah, shit!” the boy said for no apparent reason.

“No!” Mum shouted, scuffing him not-too-hard around the back of the head. “You do not use language like that! It’s wrong! God will punish you for swearing!”

She turned in my direction, dragging the boy roughly by the arm. Across the front of her shirt a message read: “See You Next Tuesday.”

2) I was distracted at the Flaming Lips gig in Victoria Park on Sunday night by what at first I thought was a hose pipe, but quickly realised was in fact the bloke next to me pissing into a cup.

Impressively, in his right hand he held a full beer, whilst in his left he held the rapidly filling cup of piss. Presumably his nob was just hanging into the cup, but I didn’t investigate further.

3) A couple of weeks ago, back when there was tennis on the TV in the afternoons, I chatted to one of the regulars in the pub. I was surprised when he ordered a diet coke. Over the course of a rather confused conversation he told me about the best places in Catford to get a drink at seven in the morning, “in case you ever want one on the way to work.”

Unsurprisingly he’d been told to cut down his drinking by the doctors, hence the diet coke.

On Saturday he came into the pub and ordered a pint of Stella. That’s okay, I thought. He’d told me he was allowed the odd drink, at the weekend and so on. Only when I got back to him did I realise that he’s so shit-balled he couldn’t focus on his change and was desperately clinging to the bar to stay upright.

Cutting back. Easier said than done.

What is the point of these? Nothing, really. Just little moments when I feel completely alien to the world. Flashes in my brain that can’t quite believe what people do to themselves or others; seconds where I question the sanity of everyone else in the world.

And then I spend two hours trying to make myself blind just to prove a point.