Cheers

I went for a run, 13 miles. When I got back to the flat I watched the Grand Prix. Indian.

I'd actually recorded it because my run overlapped. I only really like the starts anyway. So I watched the start - no crashes - and then I forwarded it at speed times six. No crashes and so I made some lunch. I had a tortilla. After lunch I watched the football. 

After the football I sat there and thought about playing a computer game. I thought about this for a while. I pictured the boxes of the games I had but none were compelling enough to make me stand up and find the box and then put the disc from within in the machine. The disc probably wasn't in the right box anyway. I've got to stop doing that, putting the disc I remove from the machine into the case of the disc I'm putting in the machine. I thought about sorting all the discs out but then part of me thinks eventually they'll all end up in the correct boxes. Eventually. Like if you randomly twist a Rubik's Cube you'll eventually just do it by accident. I looked at my Rubik's Cube and thought about twisting it for a bit.

I'd took the stickers off one time and tried to do it that way, reverse egineering but I'd lost a couple of them in the process. I was cold and I was wearing my woolly hat. I don't put the heaters on before six and I don't start drinking wine until seven. They're just my quirks. It was three. I had three hours to kill and if it had been hot I'd have thought about going for another run. It's freezing though and so I put a jacket on and went systematically through every single Sky channel pausing only briefly on the religious shouty channels. They're nuts. Who the hell watches that stuff, I wondered watching that stuff. The taxi driver in London had watched that stuff. He told us, thinking he was being helpful, and then I was back on the Sky intro and it still wasn't six. It was getting dark though, the clocks, the very essence of time itself had changed in the night. I had no clocks to change manually. The clocks on the cooker and DVD player just flash 0:00 and all the others, my phone, the TV, those two, they changed by themselves. I've got a watch in a drawer but that stops working if you stop wearing it.

I went out. I had my jacket on anyway and I went to the cafe. It was as cold out as it was in. Hand cold. I'm going to buy a pair of glove. Normal gloves, I've already got running gloves but one of those - the right one - is always crusted in snot and so I wouldn't wear them out when not running. Why? Well, in case I met a princess of course! One who wanted to kiss my hand, as is their way. She'd get down on one knee and go to kiss my outstretched hand and I'd have to say, "I wouldn't if I were you," and then she'd, I don't know, hit me with her glove, slap me with it, luckily it would be so soft, apart from the furry bit around the top which would be, in her case, crusted with diamonds and emeralds. She would be holding that bit though as she slapped me with her glove because she thought I was rejecting her when really I was just saving her from kissing my snot. I don't imagine it's a health hazard, my snot, I imagine the cold air on the glove kills all germs but that's not the point. The Princess would get back in her horse-drawn pumpkin and tear off, just because I wore the wrong gloves. I'm going to buy the right gloves.

I didn't see a princess. I saw the drunks who hang-out outside the hospital though.

I didn't make eye-contact with this group. If I was a homeless drunk I'd stand outside a laundrette. They often have big vents that pump out warm, fabricky air. Perhaps the drunks get their feeling of warmth by seeing the sick people waft out of the hospital. I might be a drunk, I might be cold, I might be homeless but at least I'm not ill, perhaps they think but that theory would hold more water if they all weren't so obviously very ill indeed.The drunks didn't say anything to me and I was glad I wasn't a woman. A princess. The drunks would have said something to a princess walking past, something leery to a princess on the hunt for me and my hand. My hip felt quite sore.

I crossed the road to the cafe and smiled and nodded at the men smoking outside. Sometimes one will say something to me in Portuguese although I reckon I look more Palestinian. The airport security certainly think so. I look a bit Taliban. My favourite thing about the cafe is I don't have to say what I want. Paulo will suggest one from the list of three things I only ever have. I only ever order a breakfast or a coffee or fish.

"Coffee?" Asked Paulo and I nodded finding the money in my pocket. I don't have to tell him how I want my coffee. He knows because I'm a regular and the coffee is the best coffee. I think you can tell the quality of the coffee in a cafe by the foreignness of its patrons. I was the only English person in the cafe. As Paulo made my coffee I asked him if he was busy. 

"It's okay," replied Paulo and I nodded. Paulo looks like a young Luis Figo. 

"Okay, Rui?" I asked Rui who was working the hotplate with gusto. Rui does everything with gusto. He has a lot of energy. Rui replied with a shout more than a word and I paid for my coffee and sat down near the counter and put a sugar in my coffee and stirred it. I looked around. It was quite busy. It was okay, as Paulo had said. I looked at the TV with its Portuguese news and tried to work out what was going on in Portugal. In Portugal a man with a moustache was being filmed talking for the news. I looked at my coffee again. I could drink ten of them in ten minutes. I was determined to make it last. I watched as Paulo spoke to Rui who listened intently for a moment before going back to his cooking and I wished I could understand what they were saying and then I was looking at it. I was looking right at it. I try not to, every time I go in a try not to look at the blackboard. Half the time I can manage it. Generally, if it's not busy, I can talk to Paulo or Rui and I don't have to look at the blackboard. If it is busy I just look at my coffee and end up looking up at that fucking board.

I'd done the blackboard. I'd written out the menu on the blackboard. It had seemed so simple. I'm not making excuses but I'd been up a stepladder and it was difficult. Still, that doesn't fucking explain why the writing all slopes downward. Nothing could explain that fucking anomally. And the fact the last of the three columns was narrower and more squashed than the first two. So much so it was hard to see the prices after the item. I'd done really thin pound signs in that last column but it didn't help much. Helped less by the fact that some of the prices had changed in the months since I'd done it. Rui or more likely Paulo had changed some of the prices due possibly to inflation and they'd had a struggle changing any in the last column. They must have cursed me as they did it. I hadn't really seen how much of a disaster it had been until I'd climbed down from the ladder. Up the ladder it had looked fine. If I'd known how bad it looked from ground level I'd have started afresh for a third time but I'd been getting all the right noises from Paulo as he prepared to open for the first time. Paulo had said it looked great. When I finally got down and looked I'd told him I was going to start again but he insisted it was fine. I'd felt he just wanted me out. The the next time I'd gone in I felt sure the board would have been repainted in fresh blackboard paint and somebody else would have written the menu out nice and straight but that hadn't happened. He'd kept it. Free coffee was the deal with for doing the board but after a 5th I insisted on paying.

I finished my coffee and went next door to the Spar and bought a bottle of wine that was less than five pounds and then I walked past the drunks outside the hospital, across the park and back to the flat. As soon as I got in I put the heaters on. It was five but it was really six. Because of the clocks. Takes a couple of days for that to all work itself out.