A wink is as good as a nod to a one eyed dog

On the eight hour journey (god blast engineering works on Sundays) from Cornwall to Home, we were joined at Newton Abbot by an interesting pair.

I didn't see them at first, what alerted me to their presence was smell. Smell that wafted back from their table to ours like an evil Bisto wisp, an acrid mixture of human sweat and stale booze.

I looked up to check out who was generating this stink. The guy was standing up having some kind of discussion with the person he was intending to sit next to. Ah oh.

He had curly grey/white hair and a mottled red face arranged around the centre piece of a huge nose. I have never seen such big pores. They weren't part of his skin, they were facial features in their own right, black craters in the surface of the red moon nose.

He had a dog; a waggy tailed Labrador, friendly like only Labs can be. The dog was clean, slobber mouthed and though his right eye worked perfectly, his left eye was minus one eyeball. He looked like he had been caught flirting by a spiteful cat fairy who had his eye sewed into a monstrous wink.

A little girl of about eight years old, sitting opposite me asked the man what had happened to Freddie (at this point we knew his name) He said, 'He didn't look both ways when he was crossing the road and a car took his eye out.' Even the little girl looked a bit sceptical at this explanation.

I wonder what really happened?

Board on board

On Saturday, I bought my first surfboard. I went to Newquay with my amigo and bought a seven foot six mini-mal. It has four blue stripes running from tip to tale a blue star right about where I have to put my face.

It is beautiful.

So this weekend in relatively mild January weather I got to try it. After battling with the beast in white water, I now have a tender knee from my lame attempts to pop up (getting to your feet) and a massive bruise on my thigh from one of the fins. But it was great; I did a couple of good runs in and pushed myself to go for slightly bigger waves than I would normally. I am very determined and will try hard, but I am, what I believe is called in surfing lingo, a great big scaredy cat. Or words to that effect.

Every time I surf,I ‘save’ myself £10 as I don’t have to hire a board. I believe this is the same method used by chic ladies when justifying spending hundreds on a Gucci handbag or Choo shoes, and hey it works for me. It is doubly good as it is an incentive to actually get out and practice in cold weather.

Tree's a crowd

There are times when you feel life just can't get any better, the sun shines brightly, you get a lovely email from an old friend and then you write a paragraph that is so good, it ought to be engraved on a gold bar and kept by the British Library in their extra-specially-good section.

And then you speak to Hackney Council.

I live on a council estate in Hackney. I am, at present, trying to get Tree Protection Orders put on the trees on my estate. I sent off an application in September and have not followed it up due to moving to Cornwall/changing life malarkey.

On 6th Dec we got a notice that three of the trees on the estate are going to be chopped down. Yesterday I called Nick who deals with the TPOs as they are known. This person is not the same person who does the assessments on the trees or is responsible for looking after them, but an architect who also deals with planning applications. The logic of this is not at all clear to me, but I have every confidence that it does make sense to someone, somewhere.

My TPO application is in his in-tray. He apologises for not looking at it. He tells me he doesn't know much about trees but that he keeps putting TPO on trees at the request of residents and no one seems to stop him.

Great, I thought, someone on my side. It might not be the most democratic process but hey, if it means I can save the copper beech and cherry blossom that add so much to my inner city life, then I don't mind.

Then he said, 'The thing is, if we get a TPO put on the trees and then Planning cut them down anyway, there isn't anything we can do, because Hackney can't sue itself.'

'Could I sue Planning?' I ask.

'Errrmmmm.'

Big sister

Excitement is in the air. I spoke to my big sister yesterday.

'Guess what is starting tonight' she said. I being submerged in the world of writing, films, research and the like, am not sure.

'Dunno?'

'Celebrity Big Brother' she said with a flourish

Oh shit.

I am, I'm very sad to say, susceptible to a weakness that predisposes me to... oh damn it, I just love this kind of mindless TV. There, I've said it. It's out. Rather than reading Great Expeditions, I'd rather watch z-list celebs irritating the hell out of each other.

Phew, now I feel lots better.

It is fascinating, to see how quickly they forget that they're on TV all the time and the microphones pick up everything they say, even when they whisper. I love it when they lie, and blatantly deny it. Sometimes, they are are aware they are lying. But you can tell sometimes that they just are unaware that they have created a new truth for themselves to fit what they want to believe. Utterly fascinating.

My sister likes it for another, much less common reason. She has been in hospital a lot over the last 10 years, suffering from mental health problems. She has had the grave misfortune to have had to live in secure wards for months at a time while battling her demons. Big Brother reminds her of being in hospital, locked in with people you don't know, with nothing much to do. Being watched all the time, by the doctors, nurses and paranoid creations.

Now she is out and better than she has been since it all first started. She finds it reassuring as they, the 'normal' people, struggle and 'go a bit mad' themselves in the equivalent of a locked ward. Remember Les Denis and Vanessa? If they can't cope with it, no wonder my sister and her ward mates with their collected disorders struggled to hang on to the little bits of sanity they had at their disposal and occasionally threw cups of tea at the wall.

Had I the cloths of heaven

All of my clothes appear to have shrunk over the Christmas period. All of them. I think there must be something wrong with my washing machine. Perhaps it has a faulty thermostat and is washing at a near boil? Or perhaps it is the new softener I am using, causing the cotton fibres to contract during the spin cycle.

Stranger still, my tops and shirts have only shrunk a bit, it is mainly my trousers and skirts. They are fine, in terms of lenght, it appears to only effect the waist band area.

Most alarming.

Happy new Tuesday

Is today officially the most depressing day of the year? Feels like it. I remember last year, they announced that the 24th of Jan was scientifically calculated to be the unhappiest day of the year. Something to do with the year's longest gap between pay days and shitty weather. But I must say, today feels pretty gloomy to me. The fun of Christmas and New Year is over, and most people are public transporting their pale faces to work.

Christmas? Stressful you say? What? It was all tinsel twinkled, mulled sage and onion happiness. Wasn't it?

But anyway, I may not be having to struggle to work, but I am seated at my worktable tapping away at my lap top, trying to make in-roads into my longest ever story. One of the assignments due in next week is a twelve page story which sticks to a set formula laid out by our lecturer. My fiction tends to err on the flash side of things, ie short. I've never written such a long story.

I have the structure written up on a piece of paper on the wall, I have a rough outline of what is going to happen in each section, and now I just need to go and gosh darn write the damn thing.