Just Like Buses

This journal is a bit like waiting for a bus; nothing passes for a few months then along come two one after another. I’ve no idea why that happens – famine then feast. It’s a fairly unremarkable sort of feast though; a couple of chicken drumsticks perhaps, some soggy crisps and a chickpea-based dip that will have you leaping from bed at three in the morning and dashing to the bathroom.

See, now I’m in a quandary. I’ve started this posting in a lull at work, a lull that started yesterday at about 3pm and is still going strong at 9pm this evening but little is tasking me at the moment so I’ve nothing really to talk about. Sure the world’s financial markets are in turmoil but since no-ones rung me for my opinion, I might as well let them stew for a bit longer. They’ll sort themselves out eventually - the rich will stay rich and the poor will get poorer. It was ever thus.

Despite anguished cries and much breast beating from owners and estate agents alike, house prices continue their downward spiral to the sort of prices they ought to be, had rampant greed not taken hold. I suppose that does wind me up, the way people become so incensed because a nonsensical situation has been corrected to one that more justly reflects the relationship between the price of your home and your earnings. And unless you have to sell it, it’s all virtual money anyway. Surely nothing has a value until it’s bought, sold or bartered.

Anyway I’ve no idea what the residential accommodation shown in today’s image could be bought for. It looks pretty picturesque but I would imagine the garden gets a bit soggy at times and it will be a touch on the noisy side when there’s fog about.

Slippery Socks

Slippery socks. If I was of a class that warranted a valet, that would be one of my requirements each morning. At best I would insist on brand new ones or maybe some delicately crafted in silk; I’ve never tried them but they sound ideal. At worst, I’d want socks that had been pre-worn so that they slip on the feet with ease; second-day socks, it you like, pre-stretched and rid of their post-wash stiffness. Socks that just glide on rather than stubbornly resisting their destiny as the intimate cushion between skin and shoe.

I suppose this is yet one more irritation that comes with age. Your extremities become more remote, more dependent and more demanding. I think this is particularly true of feet. They become wilfully malcontent, unprepared to serve just as useful terminations to your legs. They constantly beg for attention, no longer shrugging off the predations of ill-fitting shoes or laughing in the face of in-growing toenails. If your body has thickened with age, developing impediments to bending as mine has, feet seem to belong to another country, an exotic land of corn and fungus, where bed-posts leap out to molest toes and boots, which once fitted like soft, kid gloves, now rasp and chafe. They fight back. And you lose.

Until, with barely a whisper of discontent, you enter the age of woolly, fleece-lined slippers.

No images of footwear. Instead, an old gin distillery in east London. With its products both you and your feet could drink to forget. With enough swilled, your head and your feet may even reach the same level.