While a serial early riser owing to being a terrible sleeper and always being relieved to just be up in the early morning, I’m too slow at leaving the flat. I’d aimed to be out by about 08:15hrs this morning. Instead, it was just north of 08:45hrs. I’ve been playing Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Tunnel of Love’ regularly the last few days. While not a hardcore fan, I love the way the song was crafted and sung. I think it’s his best track and I never fully appreciated it when I was younger owing to the bulk of 1988 being a really bad year for me and I associate the song all too much with that bleak time. ’88 ended on a high note, ushering in the most exciting 18 months of my life, all of ’89 and the first half of ’90 (the only EXTROVERT era of my life), but it really was just the final two months of ’88 where things turned for me. It was the synth in ‘Tunnel of Love’ that did it for me. I just love a synth. But playing it repeatedly this morning definitely slowed me down.
The big news this morning, for me anyway, is that funsize apples have gone up to 99p in Lidehll. That’s me and my brief liaison with funsize fruit done. I’m not paying 99p for fruit that’s over in less than three bites. Or slices. I’ve not bitten into an apple since before my brace years. These days, apples, pears, I’m always using a knife, though I’ve yet to replace my favourite kitchen knife that was lost during the mind-melting second lockdown in 2020 which coincided with Building Management deciding that was the perfect time to carry out an extensive refurbishment of the block where I live.
I got to the café just after 10:00hrs this morning, and Seb K, the café’s greatest coffee-maker, probably with a remark already tried and honed on the café’s British regulars in the two hours since the café had been open this morning, told me, “You see what they’re like here? They have their first wildfires yesterday and they think the apocalypse has arrived. On the continent, that happens every summer.”
He had a point. Though that was a seriously uncomfortable day yesterday, culminating in me being one of two morons lapping the park yesterday evening. I knew it’d be hot but I had the lunchtime porridge to run off. After skipping Monday’s run, I didn’t want to go two days without a run as it’s unlikely I’ll have time to get out there again today when I’m supposed to be gigging tonight AND learning a new set.
I can’t say for sure if yesterday evening it was the most uncomfortably hot day I’ve ever run on, but it was certainly difficult. The bottle of water I’d parked in the freezer for an hour was hot by the time I hit 2k. I left things at 5.5k before returning home for some pasta and oily fish. The oily fish was due to expire yesterday and I don’t like wastage. But neither do I like oily fish. I don’t mind the fish while I’m eating it, but when I open it (it comes with more packaging than an Amazon parcel, only it seems to be plastic rather than cardboard), the smell hits me right away and then there’s the aftertaste. It leaves me slightly nauseous, something I can only effectively counter with sparkling water.
I’ve been trying to read up more on nutrition, which should be mandatory in schools (it may be now, but certainly wasn’t in my day) and oily fish is high up on the list of what you should be eating, but man, I’m not a big fish guy, though there are other fish that I would take over the oily. All this just to maybe live an extra week on this planet, which given this week’s heatwave, I’m not sure I’d want to live forever if the future is HOT. I don’t see what else we can do to arrest this kind of extreme (new normal) weather. We have mismanaged the planet and I can’t help feeling we’re getting what we deserve. Obviously if I was a kid, I’d feel different.
Today happens to be the 20th of July. For 13 years, until it was knocked off top spot by a beautiful summer’s day in July ’94 the day before Roberto Baggio skied his penalty in the brutal heat of the Pasadena Rose Bowl to hand Brazil the World Cup in an otherwise dreadful game, 20th of July 1981 was the greatest day of my life. There is a post elsewhere on this newsletter which I’ll link to here.
Future Me arrived in the café just after 10:17hrs. He has this tuft of white hair on his throat that he never shaves. It’s like white candy floss and you can’t fail to notice it. His stoop is so severe these days that the poor guy can’t see he’s grown this, well, what is it? I suppose it’s a neckbeard of sorts. President Abraham Lincoln was one of the neck beard’s most famous exponents but it’s overlooked that he only grew this very late in life after being told his face was so gaunt and thin, he stood a better chance of reaching the White House if he grew whiskers. Back to Future Me. It was four or five years before I finally spoke to this lovely gentleman from the west country, whose sole existence in the (for me) life-changing winter of 2010 really gave me what I felt at the time was a very likely glimpse of my future. I kept wanting to engage with Future Me but I think he, like many, mistook my diffidence for aloofness or unfriendliness, and in my head, breaking the pattern of non-communication became something so big that to finally engage with him became this massive mental hurdle I overcame with great difficulty.
When his breakfast arrives (thankfully today he’s just gone for marmalade on white toast – I was worried he was having scrambled egg on toast every morning which can’t be good), I break off from our conversation with ease. I’m good like that. Giving people the space to eat their food without having to chat to me in-between mouthfuls or perhaps while masticating, if they’re a little more uncouth. While I have as many flaws as the next person, I think if you asked those who know me what my best traits are, not talking to them while they’re eating would be put forward as one of my best qualities. Though in a restaurant setting of course, that wouldn’t work.
Meantime, my aunt calls. I ask how she fared in the heat. She gives me an extensive breakdown of her sleepless night including the precise time of her trips to the loo. Now I like detail, but I don’t need another conversation with my aunt where she tells me when she or anyone else, whether it be my uncle, or any visitors, went to the loo there.
In other Costanzas-related news, my uncle has done something else ‘wrong’, though in this case, I have to say, I agree with my aunt. Apparently, while heading outside to put the rubbish out in the communal bins, my uncle found £15 which he immediately handed to Victor, their long-time friendly concierge. My uncle, in his terrible English, told Victor, “If nobody claims it, you can keep it for yourself.”
In the unlikely event someone would claim it (the communal bins are some 35 metres away, outside the building, so it might not even have been lost by a resident), as nice a guy as he is, how open might Victor be about that £15 being handed in?
My uncle muttered something about being ‘honest’ in the background as my aunt completed the story over the phone. He refuses to put his teeth in these days, reasoning this is how 82-year-old people are meant to look, so it’s not so easy to decipher what he’s saying these days, but I get the gist. As is often the case with my aunt, without telling me she was putting me on hold, she started arguing with my uncle and it was almost a minute before she was back on the phone. “If I’d been walking behind someone and they dropped the £15, sure, I’d hand it to them. But if I found £15, as you did, with no one in sight, that £15 comes home with me.”
In the last few years, on two occasions I’ve seen people walk away from cash points in Stockwell having left large wads of cash at the machine. I’ve chased after them and handed them their money for the simple reason I hope if that ever happened to me, and let’s face it, with the world as weird and difficult as it is now, we’re all under increasing pressure and holding a thought is far more difficult than it used to be, that they would have done likewise had I been the one that had forgotten their money at the machine. The first man I chased after to return his money wore a distinctive latte-coloured leather jacket, as worn by Dr Zaius , I’d never seen him before. By the end of that week, I’d lost track of the amount of times I’d run into him on South Lambeth Road and he never stopped thanking me. The over-thanking was so awkward that if I’d known it would happen, I’d have maybe kept the money myself and saved myself those painful exchanges. The one-off ‘thank you’ should’ve sufficed.
On another occasion, someone left their big fat wallet in the loos here (the Mediterranean male prefers wads of notes to cards) in the café. Again, I handed the wallet in. The other day, meeting my sibling here for lunch, they apparently found £20 under our table and handed it into the café. I’ve only just found that out from my aunt today. That’s £35 handed in by two family members this week when that money, as my aunt says, could’ve been kept. With this cost of living crisis, and me being a writer, I’ll hold my hand up here and say £35 keeps me in Lidhell shopping for almost three weeks, though only if I commit to never buying those Funsize apples again.
I’ve yet to find out whether I’ve lost my spot on tonight’s big comedy gig. It’s been stressful trying to confirm if I can do the gig. One bugbear I have with comics is when they finish their set by saying, “And I’ll leave you on this.” It kills me. It just seems very ‘comedy course’. I could begin the final section of this post by writing, “And I’ll leave you on this”, but I won’t. Here though is my latest Nectar Points Statement.
I went into the Nine Elms Monster today on 117 points. I earned 5, buying budget blueberries, a single reasonably-sized orange (the store has its first decent-sized oranges in a year), three bananas, a couple of deodorants, one of which has gone up by 20p and a yoghurt that’s also risen, in this instance by 15p. You do wonder if these prices will ever come down.
My closing points balance is 122 points, worth £0.61p.
Not a life-changing total.
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