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Ten People I Will Talk to For You B——.

1. The guy in 39A. He's flying back to the UK after a weekend trip back to Midura for his Dad's sixtieth birthday. He decided last minute to do it and hasn't slept for days. This was great because it meant he slept the whole way on the plane and I was able to ease into this talking with people malarky at a slow pace. He is a civil engineer. Living in London on a high-skill visa. He lives in Kilburn—ah, remember those great Kilburn High Street op-shops. Has lived there for three years, but possible that his expiry date is coming to an end. May go live somewhere else though rather than going home. Name: not known.
2. A guy in the train—across the train-table from me—on the way to Bath. He was in a running club. Their moniker was a cross of some sort—I couldn’t really work out what he was talking about. He was embarrassed to wear it because it looked too much like a Nazi symbol. His friends got on the train later and he got all aloof. They were already wearing their shirts. I can see why he was embarrassed.
3. Couples who Holiday in Scotland and Montgomery I: Sitting in the bar I having dinner and my favourite pint of blackcurrant juice and lemonade, I spoke for a while for this odd little couple who holiday in both Scotland and Montgomery. She was statuesquely tall and quiet an imposing woman; he was small and quiet dotty. Very odd couple. They were here instead of there because Scotland is having a really rainy year and the midges are out of control. Stop scaring me about my next trip people! It sounded like all they do is go between. I must be missing something about the attraction of Montgomery.
4. Couples who Holiday in Scotland and Montgomery II: This couple caught me on the way out of the bar area and back to my room. They had a wacky little wiry dog that accosted every passer-by. This hotel is famous for allowing people to bring their dogs. Spoke to them for a while. They were also here because there was too thripy and wet. He had spent a bit of time in the merchant navy and so in Melbourne—he raved about St Kilda.
5. A lady also travelling OD solo. I had seen her days before when I stopped along the side of the road for a drink and an attempt at stilling the chaos of hayfever in my head. No one has as much stuff as me. She was doing really well with a tiny pack and a fast pace. But she wasn’t even sending her gear ahead—her tiny pack was all she had. I suppose if I have no bivvy, sleeping bag or roll mat my pack would be so much smaller or so much more filled with other stuff. She was at the hotel in Montgomery. That was a busy night. I chatted to her there too. She had decided that this was too much unlike a holiday for her and so the rest of her holiday was going to be going around Welshpool on the side of leisure. The next day I found her on the side of the road in Forden II waiting for the bus: it wasn’t even worth the walk in the rain (it was a hard slog, but also quite an amazing space she missed out on).
6. The guy with the two dogs along the Canal who recommended the Red Lion in Ellesmere. I would also have recommended it from just the views of the downstairs areas. Upstairs was a different matter. It was the most ickey hotel I stayed in for the whole trip.
7. In Llangattock Lingoed I pushed myself onto a table for breakfast with a male who is out to run up a mountain. There was nowhere else to sit. He spoke about forest fires a lot and said the word gorse about three million times in ten sentences.
8. Man offering eighty-five pence coffee and biscuits along the Severn to OD walkers. It was such a great idea and such a wacky place. You rang a bell and either the owner or his wife came out and offered you tea or coffee. While you waited his mad chickens pecked you for tit-bits. He was mad about statistics and turning them around: if eight per cent of accidents are caused by drunk drivers, then ninety-two per cent are caused by sober drivers—it would be better if all drivers were drunk. He had gone to a lot of trouble for walkers, converting a sun room into a bathroom and sitting area so people could sit in when it rained and had somewhere to use the bathroom (nice). He had had someone early on, when they first moved in, that he found with a blown-out knee and who wouldn’t stop for help. They also had other people stopping in for water. It did them no damage to put out the sign and so if they were home they did: they figured it would help people either way and the eighty-five pence covered their costs.
9. Neil. I was desperately trying to find somewhere to stay but couldn’t find any ‘centers of civilisation’. I ended up finding a pub and going in to ask them if they knew of any B&Bs. The landlord was getting shirty with his staff member trying to assist. Neil took over. There was a B&B back at the start of town. He went outside and called the B&B and then ran me downtown. I had to walk back the same way the next day but it was a great room in a nunnery and I had a roof over my head.

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Ten Things Possibly More Annoying Than a Vuvuzela.

* Vuvuzela: an annoying stadium trumpet played at World events such as the FIFA World Cup; producing a continual and tuneless drone.

1. Getting on the train going the wrong way from Heathrow after a twenty-four hour flight and ending up in Hayes and Harlington at midnight, necessitating a taxi ride back to the hotel I had booked so that I wouldn’t have to faff around when I got there. Hmmm!
2. Having a male standing so close behind you, in a very long immigration queue, that you can feel his stomach in the small of your back. I was livid. I ended up having words and having to drag my bag behind me in the queue so he wouldn’t come closer. It wasn’t like he wasn’t with his girlfriend. It was a cultural thing—but that was just out of line and it still makes me mad now!
3. Work—plainly and simply. People: take some responsibility for your own actions and stupidity, and, think! You are a travesty. (Written on a day when the public is particularly atrocious!!!)
4. Balinese horn tooters and purveyors of timeshare; Balinese sellers of watches, t-shirts and massages; Balinese organisers of transport, tours and taxis.
5. The ‘Budget, Budget’ ad. I can’t help repeating myself with this one. They won’t stop playing it and it ‘does my head in’. I was reading my French-English dictionary the other day (as you do) and saw ‘bouche’ (pronounced ‘Budget’ as in ‘Budget, Budget’. I sing that now instead as it is the French word for ‘mouth’.

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Ten Best Ever SJP/SATC outfits.

* SJP=Sara Jessica Parker.
** SATC=Sex and The City.
*** Possibly the majority of them will come from the last few episodes of the last series. This is for two reasons: they are the least dated and they are the most funded. There is no way that a real person could afford all of those outfits—apparently she wore the same outfit only once, but that may have been a myth.

1. The red and black spotty dress she wears in the café in Paris where she turns and finds herself facing a dog.

Ten Sensible Suggestions to Facilitate Calling Triple Zero (or Negating Its Necessity).

1. Give all staff at Maccas, 7/11, or any petrol station a small card that lists the address and telephone number of the business, their name if necessary, and the situations under which it is justifiable to hit the Hold-Up Alarm button (a hold-up for example).
2. Get all drivers to pre-pay for their petrol, and all taxi passengers to pre-pay for their fare. End of story, that's it, no exception.
3. Charge for the services of the police. When tax time comes around, and if your complaint was genuine, you get your money back. I know—fraught with danger,but a brilliant idea nonetheless.
4. Equip mobile phones with a GPS device that tells the caller where they are in large, readable type that comes up on the screen every time 000 is called.
5. If you don't have credit and you don't have a sim card—your phone doesn't work. We actually did survive quite well before we were all too cheap to get a land line and too lazy to go to the public phone.
6. Get some balls for judges. They have those fake ones for dogs—maybe they can use those. They are probably a lot like breast implants. If people have to actually pay for their crimes, maybe they will not commit them and then fewer calls would come through to 000, the people who called would be more respectful, and the police would be able to attend to all the jobs which would all be worthwhile and worthy requests for police.
7. Somehow, I am not sure how, but somehow, if we could get people to take ownership of their own s#!t, then people wouldn’t need to call the police to wade through it.
8. Educate the public as to what an ‘emergency’ actually is. An emergency is not that you need the phone number for the police station, or, that a bird pooped on your bed and you need to call a vet because you did what? to it, or, that you need a lift home.
9. Make sure the name of the exit road on any given freeway, highway or road longer than a block is on a sign—this would reduce job times by about half.
10. Have a non-emergency emergency line for thefts and other over the phone handling kind of things that are not-urgent urgent.

Ten Things to Do With Eighty-Three Hairpins.

* Thanks be to F—— who inspired this list with the eighty-three hairpins found in her black-tie outfit's hairdo.

1. Make fine and filigreed jewelery.
2. Make a delicate and intricate sculpture.
3. Pot stands and coasters ... This is beginning to sound a lot like another list pertaining to used bicycle chains.
4. Sell the set on e-bay—see how much you can get for it.You could sell it like this: 'Set of eighty-five hairpins: Incomplete.'
5. Chain-mail. If it is not enough for a vest or doublet type garment, you could make a nice chain-mail tea cosy.
6. Measuring tape. Hi, I'm after a heater that can fit into a 75x50x10 hairpin space please.
7. Decorative picket fences in the little tiny pots of cacti that almost everyone in the known universe has in their kitchen window.
8. Re-usable skewers for hors d'oeuvres: one mini pickled onion, one cube cheese, one slice kabana; one cherry tomato, one folded piece of salami, one piece pickled pepper; one cherry, one strawberry, one slice sponge finger.
9. Pins for sewing that doesn’t make holes in your delicate fabrics.
10. A very complicated hair-do.

Ten Dodgy Reasons for Going Home Early From Work.

1. The dodgy milk from the dodgy milk fridge has turned my tummy.
2. My ears are blocked. This isn’t that dodgy when your whole working life depends on listening.
3. I’m feeling ‘emotional’. Workplaces don’t put enough emphasis on mental health—I think occasionally going ‘sick’ for emotional reasons is a way to help everyone’s mental health through a program of awareness.
4. I’ve got a headache from my sore tooth. No, I am not going to the dentist.
5. I’m running out of days to pick up my shoes from the post office before they send them back to IC.
6. I really need to burp. Why are you all so judgmental? I can hear what you are thinking. Burping, or the need to burp, is a painful experience for me. It’s not dodgy, it just sounds dodgy.
7. Dodgy tuna sandwich. I am afraid of sandwich day at work now.
8. I think I’m getting a cold. (It’s probably hay fever.)
9. There is a lump on my hand and it hurts to use the mouse. If I don’t leave now, I’ll end up with carpel tunnel.
10. My bad attitude is transferring itself onto the clients—it is my civic duty to go home because bad attitude on both ends of the phone does no one any good.

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Ten Things I Would live to Write my Thesis About.

1. Huff, The World according to Garp and mothers.
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer—I know it is done to a non-dying, zombie-like death, but I could have found a new way to look at it.
3. Angels and Demons and another science/religious text along the lines of Gut Symmetry (I’ve done that too many times even though I love it) about the co-existence of scientific and religious beginnings and explanations of the way of the world.