the waiter

Hello, two stories on a theme...

WAITER
I was meeting N, the woman who refuses to date, for an after-work drink. She wanted to meet in Clapham. And had suggested one of those well-known, but entirely indistinguishable, wooden-benched, wine emporiums.

I arrive early and, with a glass of wine in hand, grab a seat by the window. Halfway through my drink, a table-waiting Jason Bourne, surreptitiously appears at my side and, in one movement, slips a little silver tray under my elbow. He disappears before I can utter a word. On the tray, a piece of neatly folded paper. I know it's not the bill – I’d paid at the bar. Hmm. Something tells me this is not legitimate bar business.

I open the hand-written note:

“Hi, my name is Andro” it reads, “and I am a trainee hairdresser at XXXX, on the XXXX and I need a model to work on. I couldn’t help but notice your roots needing doing and would like to offer you the chance to have your hair coloured by me. 25% discount. Just come into the shop at XXXX. Many thanks, Andro”

I look around. And there he is, standing shyly by the kitchen door. He waves his fingers at me. I respond back with a ‘thank you for noticing’ half nod/smile. I want to let him down gently but don’t know what unspoken sign would impart 'I’m sorry but I already have a hairdresser.'

Albeit one I'm, apparently, overdue to revisit.

WAITERS
I'm editing a book of poetry for a friend. We arrange to meet one morning, last week, at a trendy-looking pub in downtown Camberwell - which is somewhere between our respective neighbourhoods. We're meeting at 11.30am. Which seems a tad early for a pub but it looks like a good place for coffee and chat and free WiFi, should we want it. Not that I was bringing my laptop. Not to Camberwell. A place where the great, the good, the not-so great and the damn-right dodgy all fight for a bit of pavement space amongst the numerous yellow police boards asking for witness information. Some of the pubs have been gentrified, hinting of urban renewal and a brighter tomorrow (at least, for some), but mostly, it's a neighbourhood in hard times, and it shows.

I arrive a bit early and try the pub door but it’s locked. The staff are inside and they look surprised in a way that suggests this pub is not opening for 11.30. I sit on the bench outside, waiting patiently. People look at me funny as they walk past but then, I am sitting outside a pub, on a weekday, waiting for it to open. I am being watched. I look up to the window to see two of the staff peering down at me. I guess I don’t look like your typical alcoholic. And then a man arrives, who does. He too tries the door and is incredulous to find it locked. “Can you believe it’s closed? I’m gasping!” he complains to nobody in particular.

His whole demeanour suggests he isn’t exaggerating. He jumps, companionably, onto an adjoining table. He assumes I must be gasping too. He seems amiable, if tetchy. He’s a little too close. “I haven’t been able to get a drink for a few months” he volunteers rather darkly, I study his tattooed face for a moment and decide against asking why. He cranes his neck to look in the window again. A Celtic design stretches across the back of his head.

We sit in relative silence for what seems like an age. Both waiting.

I feel uncomfortable but he's completely unaware of that. “I’m not from around here, you know, I’m from North London,” he offers by way of an explanation. Pedestrians walk by and instinctively avoid eye contact with us both. “The pubs open much earlier there” he adds cheerily. I crack a smile at that.

Suddenly the doors open. My new companion springs up “ 'ere love, you can get a drink now. I’m gasping, I tell ya” and with that he marches in.

Within ten minutes, my friend arrives and we get down to work. I forget about my bench companion - but hope he eventually found his way back Up North.

the frenchman

He looked like a younger Tom Conti. We’d met in an out-of-the-way bar in Battersea where I was out drinking with N (the woman who refuses to date). It was a place so innocuous, we’d found it by accident and, at the time, I was living on the same street.

N was delighted by his accent. But let's make no bones about it, what appealed to me most about The Frenchman was that he didn’t work in the media, he was some kind of restaurant guru. This made a change. You see, when you add that ambiguous catch-all of ‘works in media’ to your job title, two things happen: first, you have something in common with 50% of the London population.- even my postman is writing a book, which explains why he is far too busy to drop off parcels but not too busy to write out one of those While You Were Out (I Couldn't Be Bothered To Carry Your Parcel) notices. I guess it's that bit closer to his real vocation.

And secondly, anyone who works in the media will spend most of the date trying to figure out how many degrees of separation lay between your respective worlds. Answer: never more than two (and Facebook is an Orwellian nightmare).

Soo, getting back to The Frenchman, he wasn’t really my type. (Tom Conti isn't my type.) And he had nasal hair. Which I felt bad about noticing. But it’s amazing what a second bottle of wine and some sideline cheering can do (from a woman who doesn't date) and so one thing led to another: yep, I boozily agreed to meet him again. Drunk in charge of a diary. There should be a law against it.

On the second date, I quickly learned that The Frenchman was entirely preoccupied with his own mortality. His thick accent and my complete inability to speak French properly (for shame) made it difficult to quite grasp the full range of his reasoning but, with a few prompts and the power of mime, I did catch the odd expression such as “need to settle down’ and ‘have kids soon’. Hmm. Alarm bells were ringing. Struggling, to lighten the mood, I asked why he hadn’t settled down yet.

Mouth turned down, shoulders raised theatrically he replied, “I am a restauranteur and have travelled all over the world. I have dated some of the most beautiful women in the world." Fair enough, I thought. He continued, "Till now, given the choice between dating the most beautiful woman in the world and dating someone who is funny and clever....someone like you.” He nods in my direction to underline his point, " I would have chosen a beautiful woman - but now I am older..." The rest of his sentence hangs in the air, lifeless.

I stop feeling bad about him looking like Tom Conti and having nasal hair and get myself the hell out.

beauty tip

Unlikely as it was, I found myself trying on a dress in a high street chain notorious for selling very large, mostly wooden, costume jewellery to middle-aged women. I’ve never understood the attraction of wearing half a tree around the neck but then I'm not old enough to understand. Another ten years or so and things could be different, I might be eyeing up my wooden coffee table and wondering what it would look like with my favourite top.

So, I'm in this shop, not because of a premature bout of Dame Judi-itis, but on a recommendation from a costume designer who claimed it was a good place for the odd ‘find'. My find was a surprisingly slinky silk dress and I was trying it on when I overheard two women by the jewellery display:

“That looks good, Rita, that does” the first tentative voice pipes up.

“Aye” says the tryer-on in a flat Yorkshire tone. She doesn't sound all that impressed.

“It's very…large, isn’t it? I mean, for a necklace...” ventures the uncertain friend, “Isn’t it heavy? All that wood?”

“It is that, love" sighs the wearer, “but at least it draws attention away, you know, from my face.”

nak'd

He was moderately known. Not a Heat-style profile but certainly recognisable. The kind of man who probably suffers from a lot of "Oi! You! I've seen you on the telly!" in the supermarket. He came in to play a small part for one episode. Nothing fancy but he still approached it with all the intensity of a young De Niro. Which was fine, except it was a bit part and this was a TV comedy not Brecht.

He was, in short, what you might call a bit precious. Handle with Care emanated from every pore. Even the thick-skinned, seen-it-all sparks gave him a wide berth less he went Baby Jane on their respective arses.

Being a single camera show, things were predictably taking longer than expected. He started to fret as he waited sulkily by the tea urn. Like a humourless grey cloud, he hovered over the rest of the cast indignant at being made to wait. We sent him back to the relative comfort of his dressing room for a few minutes. Fifteen minutes later and our Second was asked to return him to the set.

She knocked on his door. "Enter", he grandly commanded. And there he sat, in an armchair, facing the door, in all his glory. Legs spread and, bar a small, carefully placed cushion, completely naked. Mighty pleased with himself, he held her eye for a second too long.

"DON'T! Get up." She cried as he went to do just that.

Perhaps he didn't want to get his costume dirty.

actor

It was the fag end of the evening. The gig had finished and the pub was desperately trying to close around us. En masse, and after much clucking about, we all head off to the West End for a late night tipple.

He was somebody I vaguely knew through the group of friends I was with. We chatted for a bit at the crowded bar as we both vied for the barman’s attention. Small talk about common interests and friends: nothing too big, too deep or too intimate. It passed the time as the drinks were poured.

Later, on leaving the club, I notice he is leaving too. We walk the short way along Oxford Street together. More polite talk ensues as we step around the early morning drunks and beeping street cleaners. But, as I turn to say goodbye, he grabs my arm, confused.

“So, are we going to go back to yours now?”

The plain assumption takes a second to register. I look at him blankly for a moment as I mentally re-scan the evening's events to see how we ended up here. This is not a man I find attractive in any way. Aren’t actors supposed to be able to read people? Doesn’t that go with the job description?

“I’m sorry, X but I’m not really interested in a romance right now.” I panic and therefore lie.

“That’s okay," he says completely unfazed, "we can just have sex.”

Smooth. I pass on his kind offer.

moody blues

There’s no getting around it. I’ve been in a foul mood for two whole weeks. And it's getting tired. I can put it down to a combination of things: work has been up and down all year - mostly down. Is it really a year since I last worked full-time? That’s being freelance for you. It makes me want to take up a brass instrument and play forlornly by a long-forgotten pit. Worse, I will still have to pay a large chunk of money I didn’t earn to the tax-man. Maybe I can offer him a goat? Or a share in my first born, should I ever get around to it? These people are notoriously hard to please. And persistent.

Plus it’s now October and summer has officially bypassed us. To rub it in, there are Christmas decorations winking at me from shop windows and last week, in a fantastically chi-chi Shoreditch hair salon, I heard my first Christmas carol.

I may have to jump off the nearest bridge come January. Which will be about right as that's about the time of year I'm likely to get fined for wrongly filling in my tax return. Again. It's amazing to me that we can live in a society compelled to warn us that a packet of nuts 'MAY CONTAIN NUTS' and yet we're all supposed to raise the intellectual bar and navigate our way through the quagmire of clauses and sub-clauses that constitutes our tax laws at the drop of a P45. Perhaps it's all easier than I imagine. Am I taxslexic?

And I know it’s not just me feeling the seasonal pinch. This time of year, when summer greasily slips into a dank, wet autumn, London becomes a disagreeable place. Tube riding elbows find their way into soft flanks, people push and shove and drip their umbrellas unapologetically into your lap. Everyone wears a face like the proverbial smacked arse and there’s an overwhelming feeling of back-to-school blues. Suddenly, the big kid waiting to take your lunch money and the double-whammy of double-maths before break, are not such distant memories.

Resignation drips from every rotting leaf, late bus and dejected free paper. These short days and dark nights take some getting used to.

Still, this week – and not a moment too soon - I started work again. This is good news as, for six weeks, I will be paid actual folding money.  Now, if only I could find a way to unravel the great mysteries of the Inland Revenue...

second life

There is a huge gaping chasm between the person I want to be and the person I am. The person I want to be - or PIWTB - is, right now, running on a treadmill. She’s getting a whole hour in before her Pilates class starts. She is on first name terms with her postman, the taxman, ALL her neighbours (and not just the ones who look normal). She’s down with the local kids, reads to blind old people on Sundays and goes to lunch at The Ivy with Gordon Brown. She often follows that up with cocktails at George Clooney’s. Okay, okay, maybe not the last two. Gordy and George are on first name terms with the Person I Will Never Actually Be (PIWNAB). But I’m over HER now.

PIWTB is my alter ego. The one who unwittingly taunts me from the shadows of a parallel-but-quite-handy-for-local-schools-and-M25 universe. She’s always one step ahead. Doing something I feel I ought. Course, she would never taunt me intentionally, she is too nice for that. She’s really Potential Me in Technicolor and Dolby Sound. The one teachers used to lament over. She is currently writing the novel I’ve been threatening to write For Ever. She won’t let me see it in case it gives me any ideas. She’s like that. She wants me to evolve at my own pace. In fact, she’s been writing a blog for years now. Its being made into a book/TV/film with Cameron Diaz in the lead. She might well meet George after all.

She's always there, somewhere. She’d have written this blog entry last week instead of indulging in a week-long bad mood.

She never has a bad hair day. Like me. Right now. I’m not going to leave the house.

She would though. She’d never be that vain.

Always that one step ahead. (Sometimes its quite a big step, admittedly). She gently cheers me on. She inspires by default. Some days she is so out of reach she can be mistaken for the PIWNAB. Sometimes, I think they might be the same person – with a simple Clark Kent disguise separating the two. Other days, she’s almost in reach. I can smell her perfume (we share the same tastes there).

It’s amazing to me that there are people who will spend hours and hours of their real lives living a bona fide Second Life online. Their Baywatch avatars living the electronic dream: house, car and business…selling avatar clothes and avatar furniture to avatar friends. Maybe it’s a way of escaping their PIWTBs or, worse (for some people) their PIWNABs.

For me, a woman who doesn’t even own an electronic mouse (really, no-one understands how I function full-time on a tiny laptop without one) that just isn’t a possibility. I like this world too much. If I can, I’d rather materialise those dreams right here. Or at least have fun trying. I think my PIWTB would agree with that.

magic magic magic

My two phobias are a little weirder than most, admittedly. One: don’t throw things at me - a ball, a set of keys, a Frisbee, ‘the book’ (if you’re police) - because I will cower like a maltreated dog. To say I catch ‘like a girl’ would be wildly inaccurate - I don’t catch at all.

I was confronted by Weird Phobia Number Two in a pub last night. I could see his shiny jacket, from the corner of my eye, as he sharked in and out of the Friday night crowd, looking for unsuspecting punters. My heart beat a little faster. The pub in question, a really nice neighbourhood bar in Kentish Town, was celebrating its anniversary and, to mark the occasion, they’d put up balloons (ahh) prepared lots of finger food (double ahh) and booked, surely not, no, it can’t be, too late they have, they’d booked...a magician.

I could see him bothering a few people at the table nearby. Too close. I started to feel warm under the collar. It's an odd aversion to have to explain to C, a good friend of ten years, who happened to be sitting there with me. She took it in her stride (again, ten years) and, like most people over the age of twelve, I don't think she's particularly wild about them either. This meant we were bound, by the law of the universe (or sod), to get an unwelcome table visit.

Magicians, like cats, always gravitate to the person in a room who likes them the least. Cats, being contrary critters by nature, get off on that. Why sit on the lap of someone who actually wants you to? Where’s the cat fun in that? Magicians, meanwhile, are like passive-aggressive bullies. In sequins. Driven by ego, they are magnetically drawn to proving their brilliance to those who dislike them the most. People like me. And I really dislike them in the same way that some people dislike clowns, or celery or George Bush.

Is it the annoying smugness? The standard-issue spangly jackets? The prissy hand movements? Or the association with the Masons-like Magic Circle with its aura of school ground politics, one-upmanship and almost universal bad hair? Whatever it is, it makes me want to scream ‘get a proper job’ whenever one sidles up in my direction. And, yes, it’s probably a little unfair and maybe they don’t all sound like Paul McKenna and yes, they probably train very, hard to keep up ‘the illusion’, thank you very much.

Still, they are bloody irritating. And what use would they be in a crisis? What good would they be if, in some unseen awful catastrophe, we suddenly had to survive on our wits and some poorly remembered Ray Mears factoids? Unless one can actually pull a bloody rabbit out of a hat, they'd be cockroach fodder with the life expectancy of a Star Trek extra.

Course, as predicted, this particular magician came over just as soon as he’d finished boring the other table. C saved the day, flashing her brightest smile she held him off with: "I’m sorry, my friend here gets a little panicky around magicians, you know, in the same way some people get a little freaked about clowns…?"

At first he walked away confused. Perhaps he’s never met anyone who didn’t want to be ‘entertained’ before. Then he got a little annoyed and came back over: "No skin off my nose, s’not like I have to do this" Quite. But then, it's your choice. Like it's my choice not to be a participating audient. How would he like it if I walked in on him having a quiet drink in a pub and forced him to play Scrabble or watch an entire series of The Wire (because I find THAT entertaining)?

So, that’s it. Balls and magicians. I’d see a hypnotist about my problem, but then, knowing my luck, he’d turned out to be a stage one.

compass

“You’ve got to be in it to win it”

This is the kind of well-intentioned, if slightly irritating, advice friends, happily ensconced in (so-solid) relationships, dish out in spades.

They are normally the same people who’ve never actually Done It themselves, although they all know a friend of a friend who met their partner 'that way'…now they’re married with 2.3 kids, half-a-labrador and living in the suburbs in domestic nirvana, you know you really should give it a go, blah, blah, blah, what have you got to lose? I am talking about internet dating and the answer to their question is simple: my dignity.

Like communism and sliced white bread, internet dating seems like a good idea. A concept based on good sportsmanship and convenience, which somehow, in practical translation, is brutal and not very good for you. Having said that, I’m quite sure (cos a friend of a friend of a friend has, apparently, met their life partner through it) that, even in the cynical world of cyber romance, there are proper winners – perfectly matched souls whose glitteringly paths on the information superhighway of love wouldn’t have crossed under normal celestial town planning. But, in the same way that, after a major rollover, Camelot’s going to be phoning somebody, somewhere to tell them some bloody good news, the vast majority of us will be screwing up our numbers and throwing them out with yesterday’s takeaway. Quite simply, the odds are not on our side.

So why am I taking this advice to heart when I know I have more chance of being stuck by lightening or being eaten by sharks AT THE SAME TIME than find a half-decent man on the internet? Because, my inner compass appears to be stuck and it hasn't led me to that special someone in the real world.

Trouble is, I already have a terrible reputation with men. To say I am known for being a little unlucky in love is a bit like saying Italians are known for quite liking pasta. Even this blog entry is a request - made by several friends – for a quick rundown of my more notorious encounters. Too bad. I don't have the energy to delve into those right now. However, for the amusement of friends (who’ve heard these all before anyway), friends of friends and complete strangers alike (hello), here is a quick rundown of a few internet dating highlights from this year. Brace yourself.

The Ad Exec – a funny and intelligent date until halfway through dinner when he suddenly leaned across the table and said matter-of-factly:

“Oh, I didn’t realise you had such large breasts. Look, I’m not really a breast man so hope you don’t mind if I don’t fondle them very much?”

The Accountant – A very, very, very, nice man who, tragically, happened to be very, very, very dull.

Him (in full flow): "I’ve got this GREAT drinking story to tell ya, really wild. Soo, I’m at this work do, right? And I drank waay too much. I mean, waay too much. I was sooo drunk that, when I staggered to the toilet – and BELIEVE ME, I don’t remember this at all. Anyway, I stagger into the toilet. OFF MY TITS! Head to a stall and walk in on my boss ON THE TOILET! And, because, you know, because I was sooo drunk? I just stood there and pointed at him. And I laughed. I didn’t even CLOSE THE DOOR!!! It was BRILLIANT! You know what I mean?”

Me: “I don’t know what to say.”

The Guy Who Did Something in Housing – “I don’t fancy you” he says on my arrival. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Toad from Toad Hall.

The Mute – Worked in design. Didn’t speak and barely lifted his chin from his pint glass. He dribbled.

The Embittered Literary Agent – Yeesh. Angry man.

“I know what you’re going to do, you’re going to stay for one drink with me before buggering off PROBABLY TO ANOTHER DATE because, well look at you and then look at me…you girls are ALL THE SAME! You know, you really need to go on MORE THAN ONE DATE with a man to see if you have the chemistry – its not all about looks!”

The American Security Consultant – touchy feely in email, turned out to be an utter fascist in real life. Really, you could probably see that one coming. I didn’t.

The Movie Writer – in his photo, he looked a bit like a young Robin Williams. In reality, he looked like Robin Williams. Only older.

I can’t decide if its my shoulders or my internal compass that needs a damn good shaking...

pens

Biros are like cats. They appear unannounced and inveigle their way into your house. Collecting in bags, work surfaces, pockets and coffee tables, they can be as omnipresent as police officers at a football match. Today, I found one nestled underneath my kettle, I’m assuming for warmth. Uninvited, they fool you with just enough ink to get you started on that sentence/your shopping list/the phone number you’re taking down, before fading to an untimely end.

Who buys biros? I’ve never seen anybody purchase one. I certainly haven't but, as I look around my cluttered desk, there they are, silently accumulating, like plastic snowdrift, in my desk tidy. Where did they all come from? Black, blue, red (red? I would never choose red…its the biro equivalent of shouting). And yet, there they sit. Chewed lids, no lids, black pens with red lids, blue pens with black ones, the ones with splodgy ink, the ones with no ink (I never quite get around to throwing those away). Then there’s the yellow Virgin Atlantic pen, a purple Tate pen, a pencil with ‘New York’ and an image the statue of liberty, repeated in a jazzy style, along its trunk. I have been to all these places, true, but I’ve never felt the urge to splurge on customised stationery. What I have done is inadvertently collect other people’s memories. These pens are evidence of other people's lives. Amongst my ill-gotten biros sits one clicky pen. It has ‘White Hart Lane Therapy Centre’ printed on it. I’ve never been to White Hart Lane, let than know seek a therapist there. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to advertise they had, on a pen.

And yet, when push comes to shove, when the bottom line is reached, when the fat lady stops singing and the ball’s in my court, I never seem to have a pen on me. They disappear as mysteriously as they arrive.

“I know I’ve got one in my bag” I say, searching in my portable leather tardis. “Hang on...”

A full five minutes of ‘oh nearly' ‘hang on’ and few false ‘ah-hahs' later, all I’ve managed to retrieve is a hairbrush, my make up bag, an umbrella, my wallet, a bracelet I’d forgotten about, some cinema tickets from last year, my diary, a writing pad (talk about rubbing it in) but no pen. Maybe it went for a walk. But I need to write something down. What to do? I lean across to a person sitting near me:

“Excuse me, have you got a…?”

the procrastinator

I’ve got so much to do: bills to pay, accounts to balance, jobs to chase, invoices to write, scripts to edit (for work) scripts to read (for friends), presents to buy, cards to sign, a house to clean, a dentist to find, a gym to actually utilise at some point before I turn forty…

There’s always something I should be doing.

It’s always been a problem. I was a crammer at school. One of those people who, after a quick revision session at the back of the schoolbus, left their exam results in the lap of the gods. I hated homework. I really resented spending those few precious hours between home-time and bed writing 500 words or more on why Elizabeth The First Was a Terrible Monarch (that’s a Catholic education for you – never knowingly underselling itself).

I thought it was a phase but here I am, well beyond school-leaving age, with three scripts to re-storyline and a looming deadline. Am always amazed at how industrious I can be in these circumstances. So far today, I have been to the supermarket, swept up the leaves in my garden (it’s September, an utterly pointless exercise), I’ve done the ironing, booked a train ticket, surfed the internet (that’s three hours, right there) THEN noticed my windows needed cleaning…

There is a delicate balance between how pressing a task is and how inventive the displacement activity must be to offset it. I once went to Barcelona on a train to avoid looking for a job. I’m hoping for a seriously complex set of script notes soon as my skirting board needs a repaint. Meanwhile, the scripts I’m (supposed to be) working on sit patiently on my desk. A Mexican stand-off. We both know that, at some point, within the next few days, the adrenaline will kick in and I’ll be reaching for them with my pen in hand, ready for business, no messing. They look completely unflustered by this. Boy, they’re good.

street hecklers

Every woman gets used to it, I'm sure. The street hecklers. Men in white vans, the builders, the gobby one in a passing group of lads on a big night out. Like tired comics, we all have our routine responses to them too. Tried and tested. This is no time for a delayed reaction.

Then one day, one comes at you so unexpectedly, so spectacularly out-of-the-blue, it leaves you wondering if you have a neon sign above your head. Appalled at not being the Master of the Quick Response, you replay the offending incident over and over in your mind and torture yourself with the plethora of alternate responses you might've plucked from the ether if you'd had your wits about you.

Such an incident occurred to me when I worked in Covent Garden. Each lunch hour, I would navigate my way through herds of tourists, living statues, irate shoppers and gypsies selling 'lucky heather' on a search for something to take back to the office. One day, whilst passing the long haired, slightly greasy, part of the scenery, pavement artist, I hear

"Oi, you! You're almost good looking!"

I turn, and as I see the spittle on his beard evaporate, realise he's talking to me. In a street full of people, I am being appraised by the Simon Cowell of tramps. I can feel my lunch getting cold in my hands as my face burns. I mutter something unintelligible and walk away.

Of course, in a parallel universe somewhere, I reply "Oh yeah? And you're almost an artist" as I step on his chalk rendition of the Last Supper - every day for the next three months.

But in reality, what can you possibly say back to a tramp?

paint cans and other explosive elements

“Sorry love, you can’t come on here with that”

“With what?”

The bus driver nods down to the two recently purchased paint cans in my hand. I’d just bought them from B&Q and I'm attempting to board a bus on the Old Kent Road. But he isn’t having any of it.

“’Course, if you’d put them in carrier bags, it wouldn’t’ve been a problem. But you see, I’ve seen them now, so you can’t get on”

He looks like a normal person. But he's carrying that smirk of officialdom. He's enjoying this far too much. This is a man who doesn’t get to say ‘no’ enough.

“What? Because I’m carrying paint…?” I venture, trying to piece together some/any logic. “But they’re sealed” I protest.

“Yeah, but see, it’s a fire risk’

“A what?”

“Now if you’d put them in plastic bags, I would’ve let you on – but I can’t now, can I?” A reptilian smile passes his lips. “And, to be fair, no other bus driver will let you on with ‘em either. You need to put 'em in bags...or walk.” This is all news to me. Is he? Ohmigod, yes, he is, the man is actually gloating like a Bond villain. Who gloats in real life?

I’m a long way from home and the cans are feeling heavy. The other passengers begin to tutt and shuffle their feet impatiently but I’m not letting this go, this man is clearly an officious idiot.

“So putting paint cans in plastic bags somehow stops spontaneous exploding, does it? Are the anti-terror squad aware of this major breakthrough?”

Unfortunately for me, it’s hard to keep the sarcasm from tripping uncontrollably off my tongue. I’ve fallen straight into the bus driver’s hands. He tells me in no uncertain terms to get off the bus and it looks like the tired commuters are willing to help his cause, if it means the bus will get going again. I’m beat. I tell him he’s an arsehole and get off the bus. He gives me a two-fingered salute and laughs theatrically as he pulls away.

Must stop goading unreasonable bus drivers.

Eventually, a long bendy bus pulls up. I get on from the back and keep my head down, just in case…

elephants

She was on time. I couldn’t miss her as she sloped down the escalator at Waterloo. Seventeen years since we knocked about together (and almost all that time apart). Seventeen years and she looked EXACTLY the same. Bar her hair. Which was now a sophisticated, grown-up bob. She looked great.

P was my best friend at college. We did our A-levels together in a rundown polytechnic, both preferring a smoky, hairy, student refectory to the conservative constraints of a long-outgrown school common room. Needless to say, being in an arty college environment did nothing for our concentration levels (which were poor-to-middling at best). Displacement activity became our speciality. We always found inventive ways to entertain ourselves. None of it constructive.

I haven’t seen anyone from my hometown pretty much since then. I left in 1990. There were good reasons why I didn’t look back. Reasons I'd mentally packed into neat little boxes and stored away deep in my subconscious - only to have them uncovered and then reclaimed, many years later, whilst sitting in a therapist’s chair. From some things you just can't escape.

Mine was a regulation unhappy childhood and one I'd managed to keep at a healthy distance from the friends I grew up with. Even at school, I managed the mess of my real life with an attention to detail Max Clifford would be proud of: on the surface, I really kept it together. This was not a question of dignity, like most teenagers, I was simply desperate to appear normal. Occasionally, things would leak, like any good news story, and word would get around. Like the time my mother tried to run me over (luckily, she was a terrible driver and over-shot) or when she pretended she didn’t know me in the street - in front of my friends. Frankly, these things were hard to put a positive spin on. But nobody ever mentioned it, it became our very own room-living elephant. Tension was punctured, with unspoken camaraderie, by a swift change of subject, something fun and upbeat like who was currently shagging that slapper in the 4th year...

Seeing P again brought it all back. The boys, the laughs, the stupid outfits we wore. We effortlessly slipped back into each other’s speech patterns, rolling from one dusted off memory to another. Cliché number one: I laughed until I cried. Cliché number two: the years quite literally melted away. Happily, we had as much to say about our lives now. Similarities abounded in the most unexpected ways: work, men, life. I realised the very fear which had motivated me to leave all those years ago, was the glue that had made P stay. There is no rhyme or reason, right or wrong, better or worse, it’s just about muddling through.

As we drank our own body-weight in wine, we talked further, deeper. Shared secrets were aired, dead friends remembered. Things that didn't need to be forgiven, were. Tearfully, the elephant was finally acknowledged and let out to graze. I’m glad we found each other again.

doppleganger

"You know who you look like, don't cha?"

"No, why don't you tell me" I reply. I'm sitting directly behind him as my cab driver cranes round to look at me again. I know what he's going to say but am happy to go through the charade again. It's always cab drivers.

"The think is, right, you look just like her when she was young, right? Just like her! You know who I mean?"

Yes, I think do. "No, why don't you tell me."

"You don't arf look like a young Maureen Lipman, that's who! Maureen Lipman! But when she was young like."

"Really?" I say. It's the age specific-ness that always gets to me.

I am often compared to other people. I think I have one of those faces. In the late Eighties, it was Jennifer 'Dirty Dancing 'Grey. Mostly, I get compared to Sarah Jessica Parker - although I take that more as a compliment than fact. But it's the cab drivers who always go for Maureen. I once looked up pictures of her on the internet. Pictures of when she was young - I couldn't quite see the resemblance.

Then one day, I met Maureen Lipman herself. She was playing the lead in a West End show called Glorious. She was terrific. I went backstage, with a mutual friend, to congratulate her. We wove our way through an appreciative crowd of well-wishers to a busy dressing room. Barely through the door, she took one look at me and exclaimed:

"Ohmigod! You look like me when I was young!"

So, it's not just cab drivers then.