First day new school

This involves being sprayed with information and paper things that should be booklets but have been constructed as 'fun objects' - ones that are impossible for old people to read

Wore my old leaky shoes as I still have blisters from trying out my new school shoes last week - but I had new pants
 
Spent a lot of time being lost

Got a New Best Friend - her name sounds like a breakfast cereal - Crunchy took me to an Indian eaterie which has a cafeteria like being in the Taj Mahal - we got fish curry for a farthing!

I'm in Superdrug

When it comes to beauty products I'm as knowledgeable as my neighbour's cat. I inherited a bag of colours a few years ago and I do smear them on my face sometimes but now that I am preparing to go to Big School and I have already bought a satchel, some pencils and a pair of jeans, I think new make-up might give me an extra boost.

So I go to Superdrug and join a five-year old picking up tubes, peering at them and am phased by the fact that there is an entire aisle devoted to things JUST FOR EYEBROWS!!

Only little girls are in the Superdrug make-up aisles, I suspect that grown-ups go to proper lipstick shops but last time I did that I was persuaded to let a lady in a white coat turn me into a smelly clown and I'm not doing that again.

Some little girls, are clustered around a slightly taller one, aged about ten, the others watch intently as she wrinkles her nose and pokes her finger into a tube of beige cream - I stand close, hoping to learn something - a six-year-old, with the seriousness of journalist on her first interview asks

well which foundation do you use?

Last night I dreamed that I roasted a chicken

Then decided

My sister would like this

so I wrapped it up still warm and greasy and put a stamp on that cost me nine pounds and went to the post office where they weighed it and said that I needed to put another ten pound stamp on

I am thinking

this chicken is getting really quite expensive 

and it was already slipping out of the paper

I don't think it arrived because she hasn't mentioned it yet

Today I came home

Victoria bus station is chaotic and filthy, a fact I get more time to absorb than usual because I take the cheap bus which always arrives behind schedule.

Crushed in the bus-waiting scrum someone tried to pickpocket my backpack and I shocked myself, and the young man, with the fury of my reaction.

The cheap bus stops further away from home too.

I must have looked like a tired donkey with my little backpack on and dragging a wheelie case uphill (on cobbles) in the spitty drizzle.

I was also trying to carry a plastic carrier in a way that wouldn't tear the handles because it was overstuffed with London-charity-shop treasures*. 

The weather was actually being kind because as soon as I got behind my front door it turned into a torrential downpour.

The good part is that I can clearly see that the drainpipe is still unblocked at the top because the rain gushes out of the broken part and floods round the back door.

*The London Treasures are shown here, you will see that it is basically an entire outfit if I don't mind being barefoot. That wallet is large enough and has enough zippy compartments to be a make-up bag and pencil case as well as hold money. I paid twenty English pounds for all this and the charity shop lady threw in a broken umbrella for good measure

The Cat Process

This week's cat process is similar to the Christmas Cat Process;

i) gradual emergence
ii) stealthy stalking
iii) not-so-stealthy stalking
iiii) constant demands for attention

On Monday a friend came to visit

she opened my front door and it fell off it's rotten hinges, we had to shunt the door back into the door hole and make it balance convincingly until a repairman arrived.

On Tuesday I arrived at the home of a continental organist to look after a beautiful spotted cat for a few days.

The downstairs of this house contains TWO full-size out-of-a-church-pipes-long-pedals-and-everything organs and a piano. The fridge contains one hundred different bottles of chilli sauce.

I locked myself in this morning and had to rescue myself by climbing out of the downstairs window and engaging the help of a neighbour.

The builder arrived

with a bag full of rods which he screwed together and pushed up and screwed another one and pushed up and pushed up the drainpipe to the roof until suddenly he fell backwards and we were showered with the twiggy nests and feathers of all the birds in the neighbourhood.

Das Sein

I'm preparing for this new term that is rushing up to meet me,  ploughing through texts thick with references to the thoughts of dead men: French ones, Greek ones, Austrian ones and then those German ones and their very special words.

I've sought to lighten my load by interleaving the heavy boys with joy, such as a wonderful book called Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle. Also The School of Life chops the likes of Heidegger and Plato into bite-sized pieces for kindergarten philosophers like me.




The mother thrush is letting her son walk around in our garden, she's up on the fence keeping watch. His head is tatty with the remnants of baby feathers and he looks like a drunken uncle at a wedding party, an impression that deepens when a failed attempt to perch on a flimsy branch has him swaying ninety degrees in each direction before he flops back onto the grass. He doesn't fly away when I walk outside and I can see her bobbing around in panic in case I pick him up and eat him.



On Saturday I set off to meet my step-daughter for lunch, passing her father on my way out.

I was wearing one of my re-knitted woolens - it's hairy orange with a la-di-da collar

I said  I'm going to see your daughter

he said  and I see that you're going dressed as a mad woman