Boredom set in quite rapidly today. It is the second week in of ‘The Lady In The Van’ and most of the avid fans have already made their pilgrimage during the first, heady week and so it seemed to have reached its climactic end on Sunday afternoon. It says it all really, about the “vibe” down here, that Maggie Smith created more of a box office success in its opening week than ‘The Hunger Games’. It also reveals a lot that the alcohol sales here are the highest of all in the chain, boasting record takings despite having only one screen. Perhaps it suggests the locals are relaxed and happy and enjoying life to the full, or perhaps it’s because people are reaching damaging levels of boredom. This was proudly announced to us during the Christmas training session to delayed whoops, and I have to say, whatever the reason for these statistics, I found it a bit of a boost and I looked forward to the day the steaming mob tumbled in.

Today, however, is another quintessential struggle to keep our eyelids from peeling over and heeling up with irreversible blindness, a bit like when your pierced ears have not been given a stabbing in a while and therefore close up, stubbornly, through boredom and lack of purpose. There is an uncanny level of heat as well due to the heating being buggered, so it is a little like being slowly baked alive, or on colder days like being locked in an incubator; although rather than rejuvenating us it wills us towards suffocation. I try to avoid this by studying the brochure several times but then I realize this new girl might seem secretive rather than shy so I make a concerted effort to engage in conversation with my two youthful counterparts.I feel like a fraud. Here, in my black, branded polo shirt, I feel like an undercover reporter sent out to gain the trust of a gang, in the vein of a slightly-less-butch Ross Kemp perhaps (though only slightly less because if I go on giving in to the local pasties there may soon be an uncanny resemblance).

I suppose I am though, undercover; unintentionally so but yes, on the fringes, and certainly not fitting in. The conversations are limited because most of the getting-to-know-you type preliminaries/social dynamics are done with before I arrive so I feel like a piece of puzzle that doesn’t quite fit, misshapen, and awkwardly angular. But then let’s face it, everyone bar the 80 year old popcorn pro, Jack, is in the midst of puberty and conversation is yet to become an art form/necessity in life, and so to them I am probably much like an alien, or Spanish, so why bother? I feel I might as well be walking around with a huge “30” shaped balloon tied around my neck, hovering over me like an ominous cloud.

Though I too look upon them as a biologist might, captivated and curious. I try to fit in and subconsciously re-evaluate my physicality in the hope that they will accept me. So I find myself “hanging” differently, holding myself at a bit of a jaunty angle, leaning on things where possible, as if the very act of standing is an oppression sent to burden us cool cats. I also constantly hold my phone in my hand, with verve and obligation, a little like a Texan holds a gun. I check it regularly but find myself just opening up old messages and even – in particularly drastic moments – tapping in a bit of gibberish. But I soon realize even the adolescent act of refreshing Facebook over and over is now just a bit quaint and currently it’s all about Snapchat. One of the young ones explains this to me – which in itself is a sad state of affairs – and encourages me to join up. Strangely, this fills me with fear and I find myself perspiring. You can’t just “be on it”. You have to do stuff, cool stuff, funny stuff, silly stuff. But I feign enthusiasm and just thank my lucky stars that there’s no bloody signal in this place. I tell him I will do it when I get home, to which he nods approvingly and tells me to add him as a friend.

Thankfully, the probing ends there as his friend has just messaged him one such little video of him attempting to eat a Spaghetti Bolognese sandwich, pasta and all, and the whole team suddenly gather in and then fall back, rolling around the foyer laughing for what feels like twenty minutes. The beauty of Snapchat is that the videos are automatically deleted once viewed, so these comedy gems can only be replayed in your head, and as is always the way with something that is lost forever, its tale will be one of folklore and in this case, talked about hysterically for the rest of the shift and Sam the Spaghetti man will be considered a legend.

Meanwhile, one of the teenagers reeks of alcohol. Finally, I think, someone I can relate to. He tells me his friend had an impromptu party last night as his parents were away at a dog show, therefore he was duty bound to make use of this sudden freedom and so he had a BBQ in the back garden. “BBQ?!” I said, forgetting myself. “But it’s winter!” And that moment, again, when I felt like Granny Grumps. He raised his fuzzy eyebrows at me, briefly, kind even, but with a look that said, “Yeah STOOPID. Winter? Schminter. You gots to mix it up, bruv’.” He didn’t talk like that at all, of course. This was a sweet Dorset lad that had just got excited about the new local skate park, but that’s what all teenagers talk like, innit? Actually, he didn’t need to put on any bravado; he is who he is, I realized, comfortable in his skin, just like the Assistant Manager/Mobile DJ who every morning puts Paloma Faith on the main sound system in the auditorium and blasts out word for word her entire body of work as Henry the Hoover hovers behind, like an embarrassed friend. He is not afraid of being judged, not afraid to be himself. I admire him and wonder if it is the fact that this is the provinces and – to attach a cliché – has lived a sheltered life, or if indeed, those that are thrust amongst all of life like London, are the ones that retreat and just want to fit in, with constant comparisons and innate self doubt, despite being immersed in a pit worthy of a Hogarth tableau. Indeed, his confidence superseded mine. Or maybe it’s just the job title that had gone to his head.

I can learn a lot from these kids, was my summation. They do not know the pitfalls that will inevitably become them. They do not know what feeding time is at the zoo. They do not know the taste of the trough, nor the sweat of the peaks. Or perhaps they do. It is infantile of me to assume that youth cannot a wise man make. What I suppose I am really trying to say is that I feel like I am the youngest one here, shy, unsure and a little fragile. Perhaps I will join Snapchat and make a tit of myself for the hell of it. Perhaps I will sing my heart out as I do the hoovering, perhaps I will even crank up the BBQ in the snow. Why be stoopid, and boring? Why assess all the possible outcomes of life and just live in the moment as Snapchat prescribes, full of short, intense, funny, creative, entertaining snapshots, gone in a flash and remembered with a wow. These kids don’t worry what the ramifications might be if they decide to put their Spaghetti Bolognese inside two slices of bread and eat it just…because. So why should I? They act first and think later, and maybe that’s where we’re going wrong. Too much thinking, too much fear, and then we’re gone forever. Such is the passage of time that teaches us how to draw maps and try to conquer them, and as we continue learning new skills, new techniques so the map gets more complex, more labyrinthine, and we grow weary in our journey, wishing it was just a straight line as that first time we put pen to paper.

Such is the sensation that I am reverting to my youth by moving back in with my parents at their new home in Dorset, that I thought I would fully embrace the temporary transgression and get a job in the local cinema. This is around the 478th job I’ve had in my 30 years and none of them have ever come as close to making me feel 15 years old as this. Not only is my main duty to take Henry the Hoover around the auditorium looking for piles of popcorn but the assistant manager is 18 years old. Let me repeat, 18 years old. He is the one that I turn to, the one that instructs me the best way to restock the M&Ms, he is the one that tells me how best to deep clean the hot nut machine – with the hoover FYI – and he is the one that I lean on when I need help inputting a Potato Jacks family combo into the till on a busy Friday night. Without him I would be nothing. He exudes confidence, as only an 18 year old can, particularly one with such high status. During my interview, he even went so far as to explain that while he may be Assistant Manager here, this is just his mere day job, because he is also a mobile DJ and so regularly enjoys rallying a crowd. At this here local cinema in fact, he is often known to give a speech before the film begins; an introduction you might say, the warm up act even. “It makes a difference,” he explained, before playing me a recording of one such rousing sermon. There were a few jokes, a few facts, a bit of banter and a call for a communal cheer. Yes, this local cinema is going the extra mile. The only thing is the biggest audiences we have that might actually warrant such gladiatorial bellowing are normally those on a Thursday morning that shuffle in for the Silver Screen showing which includes free tea and biscuits. 

When assessing these facts it would be quite easy to understand that thoughts of running maniacally out of the Emergency Exit (with the dodgy doors) and straight into the sea might seem like the next, most logical step, but I have remained intact and realised that it is actually a very endearing community to be a part of for a while. It is a ready made sitcom. Characters abound and comic situations and comments never cease to surprise even the most impenetrable part of my brain. This is seaside frolics from fifty years ago. This is a town that has clung on to the good bits, the simpleness of something as plain as patience, and time is not galloped over but cantered through, at a pace in which to take in the scenery and subjects within it.

The speed and lack of common courtesy of which I am used to in loud and loquacious London, is very rarely found here and it has taken me time and effort to adjust. I see myself suddenly loosen, a joint suddenly drop, a focus suddenly shift,my breath suddenly deepen. 

It may well be the complete lack of urgency that lulls me into this state of nigh-on narcolepsy rather than any conscious state of surrender but I try to adjust accordingly. Most commonly I arrive by bursting through the door, usually 4 or 5 minutes late even though it only takes 2.34 minutes to walk from home to the staff room. So I plunge myself into the foyer on a nightly basis, red faced, heart pounding and full of apology. It is weird for once to have nothing other than your own blatant stupidity/complaisance/tardiness to blame rather than the usual, reliably troublesome tube/train/traffic/terrorist that awards the frazzled Londoner up to about 10 minutes of dilly-dallying. I rampage around for the first few minutes looking for tasks to undertake and then quickly succumb to the vegetative preamble before the deluge of Dorset ramblers tumble in, all seven of them, for the matinee madness that surrounds ‘The Lady in the Van’. I can only smile and think how proud and replete Alan Bennett would be to see these characters bustling about as if straight out of his own prolific pages, and how they seem to drop ten years when the manager announces there are free mince pies. 

There is only one screen at the cinema so once you have seen the current film the rest of the time it is a matter of twiddling your fingers until they start eroding and then it is a matter of chewing the side of your mouth until your teeth come through. This sounds an unappealing way to spend a day but there is something soothing about this inertia. The manager and the teenage team take to loafing about whilst staring at the walls or the street. One day we all stood watching the delivery man unload the boxes of toilet spray for around 11 minutes, intricately, agog, as if we were watching a spaceship descend to earth. I found the only thing to do was join in, despite initial feelings of confusion. Coming from London one feels a little like the prince who arrives at the castle to find the kingdom fast asleep.

But they are not without their merry making, for, three weeks before Christmas, I arrived one day to find the Manager and the Assistant Manager/Mobile DJ, both wearing evocative t-shirts, both a little too tight. One as Santa and the other as his elf, to suit the hierarchy.  I felt a trickle of sweat run down my spine, thinking ‘if they make me wear one such ensemble I may never recover and will certainly never be able to leave Lyme’. Thankfully they didn’t ask. But they did wear them, every day, and without ever really acknowledging it so it was as if they had come to work in their pyjamas by accident and no one had noticed. Though to keep things on an even keel, they decided to leave most of their festive cheer at home as if to maintain the same state of insouciance, and therefore these were now the most casual Christmas characters ever drawn.

And so this goes on, and I continue to feel like I am having an out of body experience, observing from the sidelines as usual, a natural inclination to be set apart, longing to be pinned to the wall in one of the cinematic posters, to be on the other side finally and such scenarios as this are remembered fondly, rather than being executed daily with no end in sight other than the possibility of my being sectioned.

But for now these are my dramatis personae and I am the scribbler on the edge. And there must I stop because the Assistant Manager/Mobile DJ/Head Elf is knocking on the stockroom door wondering why I’ve been in here so long, and why is the door is locked? I put my notebook away and tell him I have been sent to do a stock take and I am only half way through the box of Revels. To which he nods, knowingly, as if to say I still have so much yet to learn.

Sometimes I think my life is like one long entrance hall lined with shoes. Like arriving at one of those house parties in which the host greets you with a warm smile and the words “Shoes off, please!” And we smile back, and say,” Yes, Yes, course!” It’s not as if it has just taken me three and a quarter hours to decide that these shoes are absolutely the right ones to go with this specific ensemble that actually took me four hours and a sleepless night piecing together. No, that’s fine. In fact the shoe moment is all but over when the door to the venue has actually been opened. That’s the moment, right there, the pinnacle, the mountainous peak of the shoe wearing notion, the exact moment the makers, the designers, the sellers strive for, gone in a flash. Beyond that they might as well be used as logs for the fire. Once they’ve peaked on the threshold, your feet are on their own. Hosts should provide a little patch of red carpet so one can pose and perhaps take a selfie before being handed a pair of old socks and being allowed in.

No, it’s not funny or even ironic, dear friends. It’s a pain in the sequined arse. There should at least be a little pre-warning, so instead of going to Kurt Geiger we can book in for a dead skin scrub instead. Just a little “foot” note even, that says, ‘Bring a bottle and/or a pair of slippers’. Nothing will match the moment you walk into the living room of one such persecutor’s house with a glass of Prosecco to find several glamorous people tucking their feet under the sofa or behind cupboards, making outlandish gestures with their hands to divert attention from their fungal nail infection and the sense of relief when someone else walks in with a hole in their tights and a bright red face. Safety in numbers. No one can take their eyes off the child’s beanbag in the corner, thinking how many more espresso martinis will it take to not make it odd when you take the plunge and immerse your sweaty feet in squidginess?

The only good thing about those sort of parties is that everyone gets pissed as quickly as possible so they forget they even have feet. In a way, they’re actually the most fun. Sometimes it even turns into a celebration of feet. People give way to abandon and actually start expressing themselves with their feet rather than their hands. By the end of the night every reveller realises their feet are actually their best asset and vows to henceforth liberate them as often as possible and go barefoot through life. Which is a saving grace because upon actually leaving the party no one can ever actually find both shoes and would much rather brave the naked tippy-toes to the taxi than suffer Hairy Dan’s Docksiders.

So, in a very roundabout way this is a little like my life: an endless entrance hall of shoes in all styles and sizes, and days seemingly spent trying them all on, trying to get through to the bespoke pair of glittery slippers to finally gallivant about happily, with neither blood nor blisters.  I love a shoe analogy. Shoes! Currently, for example, I am wearing in a pair of muddy boots due to a dalliance with Dorset.

I have come to Dorset to recoup, to gather the semblance of sanity I am hoping is still knocking about in the old tin box upstairs; to write, to breathe, to walk, to oil the joints, to calm the heady mix of fear and loathing, to find clarity once more. London, I love you, but you are cruel sometimes and I am bruised and worn down and need time out to lick my wounds before running onto the battlefield once more, such is the artsy-fartsy path I am drawn to. And like a complicated lover that gives all the pain and all the pleasure, one is constantly lured back, because it is everything, isn’t it? It is all of life: sweet and salty, hot and sour, birth and death, drought and a storm, hibernation and a hunt, mania and muteness. All the senses are pricked and life is on the precipice, and all you have is hope in your heart and a self-flagellating stick.

So here I am in Dorset on the precipice of the ocean, and it is absurd as it is glorious, as it is lost as it is found. Already my faith in humanity has been restored and all it took was a conversation about teapots in a charity shop.

If I were to even entertain the idea of eating a full size tuna baguette I’d grow from Jekyll to Hyde quicker than you can say “green with envy”. But I had to sit in Pret and endure thirty minutes of watching this beautiful Amazonian beast eat a big, fat toastie oozing with melted cheese in as graceful a manner as Audrey Hepburn nibbling a ritz cracker whilst someone drapes pearls around her neck. Her red Chanel lipstick did not move. I was convinced it must have been tattooed on. 

Two things caught my attention today:

1. That, in the office I am currently in, there is an Evacuation Seat in the foyer.
2. That the name of the perfume I always spray in Boots on the way into work is called ‘ESCAPE’.

Irony abounds.

It is not my intention to rally against my own sex but it is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an office job must be in want of a wipe. A wet wipe. And a damn good airing. And by airing I mean of the vajayjay variety.

I am usually averse to coarse nicknames, titles that are made up to laugh at and diminish one’s respect, especially those made up about women by men. And The Bearded Oyster is one such sobriquet. But in this instance I feel it might be rather fitting. There’s a reason such a term exists. I think we can all agree it is quite an impressive sounding alias. There is something quite almighty about it – something mysterious, ancient sounding; a mystical creature perhaps, as dangerous as it is wise.

“Thou shalt journey to the Seventh Stone, and there you will find The Bearded Oyster, a prophet so wise of mind, a true master, that thou life will henceforth be of a greater kind”.

“Oooh,” they said, as they set off. “Is it borne of land or sea? Will it eat us or will it set us free?”

The same description could be as equally appropriate for a good fanny. (Sorry, I should just say fanny because all fannies are good). Why, Legendary Men have journeyed to the bucolic land of The Bearded Oyster since the beginning of time, and their lives have indeed been made greater. (Perhaps the freedom comes from being eaten…?) Such tales have been whispered among curious circles for centuries, and so the legend continues.

But there is also another reason why The Bearded Oyster is pseudonym for vag. Because if you have, like me, been working for lost, long and lonely weeks in a variety of offices in inner city London, you too will know that entering a cubicle of the women’s toilets is like being sucked alive by some such scary sea monster and you realise that all these females have been so long sitting with crossed legs that their (our – who am I kidding?) vaginas get CLAMmed shut with such an intensity that it repeatedly suffocates, gasps for breath, for fresh air, and when it is again prized open at limited intervals it’s odour can only be likened to the opening of a sealed packet of processed thin-sliced budget ham. Watery and warm, musty, and a bit fleshy.

I would not mention this to the world for want of protection of my tribe but it has shocked me how often this particular scent is found; every busy office I’ve worked in, in fact. And I feel now a sense of duty to we delicate women, crossing our legs and sitting sweetly all the long days through. I say it is time to embrace the gap and SPREAD THY LEGS. If sit we must, sit open, sit wide. Rest our legs on either arm rest, for example. Lean one leg up the wall. And why not give it a few lunges while we’re gobbling down those Garibaldis? Even better, let’s ditch those suffocating tights altogether, and embrace the whore pants. Such scope for liberty and ventilation with their lacy, gaping holes. And as we struggle through these Summer months, let us throw cunt to the wind, forgo the fusty fanny once and for all and abandon our knickers altogether!

1. That in every drawer of every receptionist in London there will be, without fail: a nail file, nail varnish, hand cream, Hedex, a bag of raw almonds and a jar of Whole Earth peanut butter. Without fail.

2. That you will quickly master the art of looking busy and productive when anyone is around and when they leave you will return to slouching and painting your nails.

3. That you get repetitive strain injury from holding your finger over the mouse in order to press the off button on Facebook quicker than the speed of light.

4. That you will grow to HATE Facebook, find it dull and tedious and think everyone is stupid, including yourself, but you cannot seem to do anything other than trawl through the homepage for eight hours every day.

5. That men who rule the world are imbeciles. This might be something you already know but it is confirmed when you witness every single Head of every single Corporation fail to understand what it means to PRESS THE GREEN BUTTON TO OPEN THE DOOR, YES IT IS RIGHT BESIDE THE DOOR, YES THAT ONE. NOW PRESS IT, YES, NOW PULL THE DOOR. TOWARDS YOU, YES. WELL DONE. GOODBYE LORD SAINT SIR.

6. That every day you will watch every business person return with a bag of lunch that has cost them at least £20 as you sit and eat your satsuma that you stole from your last temp job.

7. That Pret a Manger’s 99p filter coffee will be your saviour because you can sneak in your own lunch and only spend 99p.

8. That you will get so used to sitting at a swanky desk wearing a suit jacket and looking the part but not actually doing anything other than sitting and mastering the art of sleeping with your eyes open, that when someone actually takes a chance and actually asks you to do an actual job, you will break out into a sweat akin to being told you must jump out of a flying plane.

9. That the “jobs” you may get asked to do will allow you to practice a skill set you never knew you had and you will feel a great sense of achievement and self-progression, such as taking staples out of paper, placing paper into shredder, transferring shredded paper into recycling bag and putting recycling bag into bin area.

10. That there are always two types of biscuit cupboard in every office – one being for the Finest Selection, reserved for client meetings, consisting of hazelnut and orange blossom cantucci and white chocolate and lavender cookies, and then the other, more classic selection consisting of gone-off jaffa cakes and Smart Price custard creams. Either way, you will gradually eat your way through both biscuit cupboards, but only in a sneaky, clandestine fashion, a bit like if Tom Cruise were played by Stuart Little in Mission Impossible.

11. You will also eat your way through the receptionist’s – the one who you are covering – supply of almonds and Whole Foods peanut butter and then worry about it a bit that she might be one of those people who knows exactly how many almonds there are left in the bag. (Like you would).

12. That there are no Men Receptionists. Anywhere. Ever.

Having reached a round, ripe 30 years, I feel one knows oneself better. At least, one is trying to know oneself better. The likes, the dislikes, the things that make one happy, the things that don’t. One is far, far away from wisdom and enlightenment and happiness still feels like it is a thing to be obtained rather than something entwined with everything else, able to be got at at any moment, if only one would just let go. This much I know and so far my most significant achievement to date post-30 is understanding that those moments stood by the cupboard door, opening the cupboard door, reaching in the cupboard, seeing the jar of peanut butter, grabbing the jar of peanut butter, opening the lid of the jar of peanut butter, taking a deep sniff of the peanut butter, taking a spoon into the peanut butter and putting the peanut butter into your salivating mouth are a delectable, all-consuming, higher-plane, seismic euphoria. Ergo: happiness.

So, such is my collaboration with said happiness-giver, peanut butter, that when I was assigned a temp job for seven days in which I would be in sole charge of an office while the team were away, one can imagine the mixture of delight and horror when I found my only companion was an opened but barely touched jar of posh peanut butter. I think I managed a casual shrug when I first arrived. I can handle this, I thought, in my calm, fresh, first-day state. What of it? I won’t be a slave to this little pot of joy. There was also a box of fruit that I was told to help myself to, and I thought, if I happen to need any nourishment, I will reach for one of those there plums, thank you very much, because I am a strong, 30 year old woman, with intelligence and grace.

How naive. Truth be told I didn’t even get past the first day without dunking into it with a teaspoon. It started with just a little sniff – around the 3pm slump (understandable) – and then out of sheer curiosity, but still with strength and willpower, just a little scrape to see if it was indeed a superior brand, or if Sainsbury’s own was just as good – because I would know. Yes, it was bloody good. But naturally I needed three spoonfuls to properly judge.

Needless to say, the whole week was spent with an imaginary umbilical cord between me and this tub of gooey ambrosia. It gave a gentle tug at first but by the end of the week I was like some wild-eyed mother/creature clawing my way back to my kidnapped offspring. It’s amazing how dramatically one can change in a matter of days when left alone. At one point, on the edge of insanity, I was convinced that this was some social experiment. I started off in a very controlled, mature fashion – reading the newspaper, delicately preparing my healthy lunch, cupboard firmly closed with no wild urges to break into it with a hammer to rescue my love. I would diligently answer the telephone, e-mail the messages. Things started to waver a bit when I made the odd decision to do an hour of yoga a day but still, how healthy and productive was I?

But by the last couple of days I had gone completely bat-shit, stir crazy and was roaming around like a Tyrannosaurus-Rex on heat. The yoga went out the window, the helpful telephone manner was abandoned and the cucumber on rice cakes was thrown to the wayside. I had my feet up on the desk, watching Breaking Bad back to back, belly hanging out and the tub of peanut butter had been aggressively torn off and every morsel was licked, sucked, chewed and relished. The cleaners turned up at one point and I actually fell off my swivel chair the way Michael J Fox might have in the ’80s.

And on the Seventh day, there was no rest because I now had one day to hunt down another jar of this particular godforsaken peanut butter (forgive me, peanut butter). So I scampered around Soho desperately looking for the poshest food shops that might have imported this American looking brand, to no avail. And then I went onto amazon and yes they had it but no it couldn’t be delivered in the next hour. Oh God. What if it was the CEO’s peanut butter? Would I forever get a black mark on my temp CV for being the peanut butter stealer? What if there was CCTV? Were the team all going to sit around not eating their favourite peanut butter and watch footage of dirty old me, slowly resembling Mrs. Twit in a soiled dressing gown and thrusting peanut butter into my catatonic chops?

Well, hopefully I wouldn’t give them cause to because Wholefoods came to the rescue!! (Bet they get that statement a lot from middle class desperadoes). So I pranced back to the office draping my proverbial dressing gown with a huge grin on my face knowing that I would now, dutifully, have to go back and eat just enough to make it look like it had never been touched in the first place, complete with label hanging off just so, as I had originally found it. (Anybody would think it was a murder weapon).

So this week I am office sitting. I am getting paid to sit in a posh office on my own for 7 days while the team – whom I’ve never met – go to Italy. I am getting paid to sit and twiddle. It’s Day 4 and so far my biggest undertaking has been waiting at the door to give a man in a cap a box. I didn’t even have to squiggle my name on a weird calculator-gun type thing. I think boredom crept in like rigamortis on the second hour of the first day and so I my state since then has surpassed to something resembling a coma, or Charlie Sheen at a Bridge tournament. Thankfully there is a Nespresso machine so that is keeping me from shutting down completely and I eeenie-meenie-miney-mo my way through the various capsules, mostly picking purple because that’s my favourite colour. I swore I would make this week count, creatively speaking, but I seem to have had my finger on Instagram more times than Kim Kardashian and it’s taken me four whole days to even open up Microsoft Word, let alone spend a day choosing a font and deciding if I want the heading in bold or not. I thought to myself, now now Sophie, come on, no excuses – someone is basically paying you to write (in a very roundabout way), I mean seven whole, nine hour days  in front of a computer, you could actually write a book in this time, a comedy series, something, anything! As per usual I will probably get a flurry of inspiration and energy in the last hour of the last day then kick and spit about the fact I procrastinated for 63 hours back to back, a record in anyone’s book.

Living in London makes one susceptible and immune to odd behaviour. It is the gift of the Londoner to be free from commonplace concerns and shudder not at freakish and otherwise eye-watering sights on a daily basis, such as the African-American woman standing on the corner shooting “all the white people” with her fingers, wearing pink hot pants and a kagool covered in stains that may well be ketchup but are probably blood; or the pensioner who dons a Stetson and mismatching espadrilles and a breath that could create chemical warfare whilst leaning against you as he number-ones it up the poster for Scientology and you do a slo-mo Riverdance so as not to get steaming wee on your Mary-Janes; or the woman eating cat food in the foyer of the leisure centre; or the teenager with zombie contact lenses who chooses lucky you to stare at all the way up the Victoria line as he holds hands with his sixty year old girlfriend wearing a gimp mask. All these things are as normal to the Londoner as the sound of sirens in 1940. Disdain is removed because all you want to do is get to your destination and these oddities are mere obstacles, and you are Randall Wayne in your own zombie apocalypse. Indeed, any sign of anxiety, i.e. those that bump into you or walk too slow down the escalators are deemed unworthy demons of the state and should be made punishable by death and you might as well give them a little shove so they tumble like dominoes and you can get home three minutes early. Your default walking pace is akin to that of having shit yourself in Mayfair and searching for the nearest public loo, or being chased by a boss-eyed Texan clutching a chainsaw or a Christian Aid clipboard. All this combined with the level of insouciance and self-importance as Kim Jong-un, whereby it seems seminal to the universe that your foot should be the first to step into the tangled mosh pit of Oxford Circus, and bathing your wounded elbows in Oilatum is a nightly ritual.

So, why is it that when it rains in London everyone reacts as if there has been a terrorist attack? The journey home the other night was nigh on catastrophic and took almost three times as long as normal – and we’re talking a bus journey here which on any normal day is akin to taking a tour around Australia in an electric wheelchair. People huddled to each other in puddled sculptures – a wet and weary mass of tortuous umbrellas, sloppy satchels, sodden sleeves, crumpled paper bags and mobiles elbowed up and out striking desperate calls to loved ones not sure if they’ll ever see them again and no, they certainly won’t be able to pop into Co Op to get some cheesestrings for Tommy. Women rendered hard and vulnerable all at once, mascara smudged as if they’ve been crying over the dead body of Sandra, the Office Manager, with a look of vengeance in their eyes. Pensioners clinging to lamp posts and a Polish man with the body of Cyclops standing rooted, arms folded as if he is immune to the punishment of the Gods despite people hurtling into him like giddy rhinos. I found myself joining them and tearing through the crowds to take shelter in a doorway to avoid the falling debris. And then it hit me – what the fuck are we all doing? This is not a typhoon, our houses will still be standing and the route for the 185 will not be flooded with crocodiles. We will not form webbed feet and take to wading. Everything is unchanged, so why the mass hysteria? Maybe everyone is so regularly catatonic that one chink in the armour renders us primeval and all evolution is dissolved as quick as you can scream, “Run!” or “Rbdjfbsdjf sjf j” as our ancestors would have said. If it starts to hail, God forbid, maybe the government could start issuing Exosuits before people crawl into A&E with chunks of bloodied flesh missing from all the icy boulders…