It’s something of a messed up week for me, certainly the back end of it. Anything that breaks up my daily routine gives me a problem. On a brighter note though, perhaps some of my considerable stock of OCDs are melting. Lately I’ve noticed that when I swing my big winter coat on the back of my chair in either of the cafés, if any of it is on the floor, like the cuffs for instance, it bothers me less. I think this might be a welcome hangover of the meds I came off. While useless as an antidepressant, their legacy may have been to make me less anal. A part of me still thinks though, as far as OCDs go, not wanting your coat to touch any part of any floor is pretty good. I’ve always known I couldn’t have lived in any age in humankind’s long and storied history where trousers weren’t an option. I’m just not a robes kind of guy. Hygiene-wise, they simply don’t work for me.
I took a 5.5k run at lunchtime, for the most part able to blank my mind and manage my way around the muddy park with the usual default-grimace. There was the odd moment where I found myself thinking about how I need to make a final decision on my default font this year. At the moment I’m flitting between Bookman Old Style, the font of my early-00s grieving years, and Calibri. I prefer Bookman, but why return to a font that only reminds me bereavements and the momentum I had back then as I progressed up the TV writing ranks? Am I not just revisiting the past?
On my way to THE café, forgetting there were bus strikes affecting my area once again, I switched to an alternate bus route. Disembarking first on Stockwell Road to pay my aunt and uncle a visit, there was, on the lower deck, the curious spectacle of a septuagenarian man who was at least thirty two years old for the diamond stud he was wearing. He wore a flamboyant ring too on his little finger. Now I’m not a fan of jewellery (a word I’ve also always struggled to spell) anyway, but a ring on the little finger has always struck me as a little vulgar. Mr Flamboyant also had a fancy walking stick, the anatomic handle silver plated, some animal or other that I couldn’t quite make out, carved on it. But what really secured his status as the day’s enduring image was his eating. He was working his way through a packet of crisps very slowly, and his tongue would drop out of his mouth some five or six seconds before he placed the latest crisps onto the tongue, at which moment the tongue would quickly retreat into the mouth lizard-like.
There was nothing much to report in the café. I got some good work done. The afternoons are more productive than the mornings have been in the last year or so since I went into late-in-life raconteur mode with regulars I’d previously ignored for almost two decades. As I left, I made some SMALL talk with The Beard regarding Monday night’s football. His English team, Spurs, had secured a vital win at Fulham. I dragged on the exchange a little too long. I really need to work out how to wind down these conversations better. Still, I can’t be too hard on myself. A few years ago, I wasn’t even having these dialogues.
Twitter: @1607WestEgg
FB: @DRTcomedy
Instagram: @1607westegg
TikTok: @1607WestEgg