The Car

Leaving for work there'd been no car outside in the designated parking area for the flats but when I got back in the afternoon there was most certainly a car there. It was like somebody had flicked a switch that made a car appear. And not just any car, let me tell you, a really stupid car. Occasionally somebody parks in one of the two spaces outside. The shop itself has a garage, the spaces are for the flats but the owner of the building sometimes parks in one of the spaces but he's got a proper car and so I looked at the car for a while before going inside and getting changed. I went for a run along the front.

I hoped that when I got back the car would be gone and everything would be back to normal but it was still there and so I stood a looked at it for a while before I got too cold. The car was American and looked like a tombstone that had been pushed over by a Welshman.

Getting changed I decided the car had been dumped and everything was going to be okay. That explained it nicely. If it was still there in a day I'd report it to somebody. The correct authorities or the people who tow away dumped cars. And the knobs in the scrapyard can deal with it. I hate those guys. The scrapyard guys. The scrapyard is at the top of the valley. I work in the regular waste disposal plant which is at the bottom of the valley. There's tension there between the two factions. The scrapyard dicks drive too fast past our gates getting up to their scrapyard in their cars festooned with parts they've harvested. Fucking dicks. Like Mod scooters in car form. I have to go up there sometimes and by God it's grim. Just jagged metal everywhere, it doesn't need to be like that.

Example: I made this at work, well, started it off my own back and now the guys - especially Vince - save the any cuddly-duddly toys for me and when I get a chance I hang them up there, a dump needn't be a depressing place to visit.

You go up to the scrapyard and they've got nothing like that. They've got a warehouse full of car parts. Big wow.

After I got changed I went to the window and looked down on the car. I checked on it regularly over the next hour and then I went to the cafe for my tea. I had fish and a laugh with Rui. His mum's dog ate his teeth and I'm not even joking. He'd been eating chicken wings at his mum's and had taken his teeth out so he could gnaw on the bones and his mother had given the pile of gnawed bones to the dog and also Rui's teeth. He laughed about this and so did I but if it happened to me I'd probably kill myself. I bought some wine from the Spar and when I got back with my wine I paused next to the car. There was a light on in the flat upstairs. My worst fear realised. And so I went inside and opened my wine and listened. The person upstairs, the owner of the car seemed to be using a fuck load of hot water. The cylinder seemed to be refilling constantly and it was hard to relax. Eventually I turned to TV on to cover the noise. I watched Masterchef Australia although it was a masterclass show and I don't like those shows. I like the shows when somebody gets eliminated.

I did 6x1km with 500m jogs between. After the forth I met Kenny who cycled beside me for the last two. I thought I'd been going as fast as possible for the first 4ks but the last two, trying to keep up with Kenny, were the fastest. I wore my Asics Piranhas and after the sixth I sat on the wall and let Kenny hold one. He couldn't believe how light they were.

Upstairs

"Quick!" I'd shouted to Sam the first time. "Come here, quick!" I didn't know at the time but he needn't have rushed. It was a Sunday evening and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Sam didn't appear immediately. "Quick!" I shouted and eventually I heard him put the N64 control pad down and start heading for my voice. I was standing at my bedroom door. Sam was wary. I beckoned with my finger and he came into my room. He stood puzzled for a moment and then his face broke out in a wide smile. I nodded, grinning. The woman upstairs was getting banged. We stood there listening and nodding and grinning. "Fucking hell," I told him. Sam was concentrating though, his head cocked as he grinned. "They're going for it," I told him.

"Go on!" Shouted Sam because he's an idiot and gets carried away and I scolded him with and angry face and a shake of my head. That was out of order. The woman had complained about me once already. When Andy had tried to break in the back of the building with a ladder stolen from the next door building site. He'd climbed the ladder to my window and shouted for me to let him in for an hour like a really annoying drunken dickhead vampire from Salem's Lot.

He'd been clearly drunk and I'd not let him in because I couldn't be bothered but after an hour he hadn't given up, even though he could have walked home in the time he'd been shouting, and so I'd let him in and he slept on the couch. The woman upstairs had complained to the letting agent. She'd said she was fearful for her life and I bought her a box of chocolates from the Spar.

When Sam's voice has stopped echoing around the room I listened carefully hoping the pounding sound hadn't stopped. That would be too awkward. I'd only bumped into the woman once, out on the stairs but it could happen again and I didn't want her to know I'd heard her having sex. She was definitely having sex and thankfully she hadn't heard my friend's shout of encouragement. We listened some more. They were really going for it. You could hear the odd male muffled deep sound. She sometimes said something but the pounding was constant. We stood there grinning, listening. Ten minutes later it was still going on and we were baffled and then the pace increased and we nodded. Sam gave me a thumbs up and looked back up to the ceiling.

This gave me the opportunity to
 discretely tuck my stiffy into my waistband.

Incredibly the increased pace didn't wasn't the portent we imagined. After a few minutes of rapid pumping it settled down again and continued steadily and Sam looked puzzled. I shook my head.

"Is she nice?" He asked looking for answers.

"She's alright actually!" I told him. Her face didn't explain what we were hearing. We stood and smiled and listened. "That's amazing," I told him. We gave up before they did and returned to Turok 2 occasionally pausing the game, listening and sniggering. That had been the first time but this then happened at least once a month, always on Sunday afternoons, always lasting far too long, for as long as she was there. I never saw the guy come or go and I was pleased when the woman moved out. It took me a while to realize she'd gone but after a couple of weeks I realized I hadn't heard a single sound from upstairs. I loved the silence. I could relax, I didn't have to worry about anybody else and I began to think nobody was going to move in upstairs. Sam got a girlfriend and stopped coming around but I'm fine on my own. The building consisted of two flats, one above the other on top of an empty shop and with her gone the building was mine.

And then the car appeared.

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.

Cafe Relógio

My breakfast arrived and there's one sausage on it. Before even thinking about complaining I lifted the bacon with my knife, It was a reflex action, just to check. There was no way a sausage could be under the bacon. Unless it was flat and that's not how a sausage is. A sausage is defined by its shape. So although it was very unlikely to be under there I still checked because what I was seeing was so wrong it was hard to process. I even looked around, I don't know why, I didn't think I'd see it just floating there. I went up to Paulo and said, not accusational or anything, lightly, matter of factly, "one sausage?" He wiped his hands on his apron and looked at the plate, clearly untouched and then he shouted at Rui.

"One sausage!" He shouted and Rui who despite being busy came over and looked at the plate  with  facefull of dawning confusion and he shook his head and looked up at Paulo. They're both the same height, pretty much, but Rui had been bending over to get a good look at my breakfast. Perhaps he's short-sighted. Paulo pointed at the plate and then said something in foreign to Rui.  rui shrugged. Paulo turned  back to me and rolled his eyes. I stood at the counter, it would be pointless sitting down as I didn't have a complete breakfast and I didn't intend to start eating it before it was whole.  Paulo was taking orders and so I moved aside and stared at the TV screen showing Portuguese news. I didn't understand any of it. A few moments later Rui brought another sausage and put it on my plate. I now had two, the correct number but Rui still eyed the plate with suspicion as I lifted it, perhaps thinking the sausage might vanish again. "Cheers, Rui," I said. I pronounce his name Roy. Paulo says it different. It was no biggie really but fucking hell, one sausage. The breakfast was awesome, as always. Too big if anything but I made sure I finished the sausages because of the scene I'd made.

That night while going through the motions of cleaning the kitchen area, the light brown tiled floor, Rui discovered a sausage that looked like it had been cooked that day. it was sideways and tight up against the bottom of the counter, in the shadows. He waved it at Paulo with a relieved expression on his face. He wasn't going mad.

Running

Today I ran around the reservoir because it was windy. Too windy to run along the front. I really went for it but my time was pretty slow. I don't know why. I'm going to blame the wind but to be honest it felt pretty sheltered up there. I mean, that's why I went there. Oh yeah, I nearly slipped over. The route is a gravel path that slopes gently downhill for a mile. I go fast down this bit 5.30min/mile. Actually the very first bit is quite steep downhill, it's hard to start off going down a steep hill, but then it levels out although it's still slightly downhill. This is a mile exactly until you get to the actual dam that holds in the water and creates the reservoir. So when you get to the damn you drop right down, down steps and a steep twisty path until you get to the big flat area in front of the dam. It was here I nearly slipped.  I was sliding a bit on the marshy grass, arms going everywhere. I must have looked like an idiot but luckily I didn't hit the deck and I don't think anybody saw me. It put me off my stride a bit though and running to the bottom car park and gate which I have to touch for the time to count I felt I wasn't going to be on for a good time. The way back is mental, it's all up and down really steep slopes, it's like that for a mile, around the far side of the reservoir, before it finally drops down and puts you back on the path that you run down. You run up this path and have to face the steep downhill bit in reverse at the end, except this time it's uphill. I fucking love running around the reservoir. I wore too much clothing. A hat, gloves, base-layer. You name it, I wore it. My Adidas Adios 2 on my feet. Because the hills are so steep I find the extra cushioning in the heels to be a good thing. The three miles took 19mins 30seconds.