Overheard in a public lavatory

“I was sewing my trousers the other day and I realised that I couldn’t sew”

“Guy can, he’s got the skills”

“I don’t have the skills but I developed my own technique. Its brilliant!”

[Two rather plummy-sounding young men in Barbours - looked like Rugby-playing students]

Waterloo morning

Overheard on a platform at Waterloo Station:

“All I do all day is stand here and blow the whistle. I dress up like a fool and stand around on the platform and blow a whistle”

[A middle-aged bearded Railway Servant, as we would have called them a century ago]

Overheard on the train:

“Just imagine walking up and down Oxford Street pretending to be hats and dogs”

[That attracted my attention. I really very much wanted it to be "hats and dogs" not "cats and dogs". Imagine the unconfined nature of my joy when the reply came:]

“We should do it! Dress up as Monopoly pieces!”

[Two teenage girls with very short skirts and too much makeup who looked as if they were enjoying their half-term. Though they then went on to spoil the general aura of post-modern anti-consumerist Situationism with:]

“Have you seen my MySpace profile this week? You saw X on my friends list?”

“X Y? Yeah, but I didn’t look at HIS profile!”

“His picture is SO GAY!!!! He’s like, a goth, he’s using this goth profile!”

“But he’s such a chav!”

“Yeah, he’s a real chav. He listens to NU METAL!”

Kitten fell in the bath!

Overheard on a train

“They showed you? You saw it?”

“Oh it was, like, disgusting! Her body was all, like, withered away.”

“Decomposed?”

“Yeah, it was disgusting. There was, like, little bugs hanging off it eating her body”

[...]

“At the end of the day she was after the money. The fact that she did that with the corpse just shows she was after the money”

(Two young Asian women talkng on the train from New Cross to London Bridge)

Charles Dickens used to take that train. Now we know where he got all his crazy ideas from.

Delayed kittens

Postyings here have been a bit in abeyance for the last couple of months. Not because there were no more walks or photos from them (there have been hundreds) but more because our Internet access was down at home and either I haven’t been at work or else I’ve been a bit snowed under when I was there.

But now we have Internet access, and phone working, and some new furniture (mysteriously its all in Abi’s room not mine, how did that work?) and Abi has started an OU course, and we have KITTENS! And the spirits did it all in a night. Well, about a fortnight actually, perhaps Christmas ghosts have slackened a bit since Dickens’s time.

Maybe the long-promised rant about the layout of central Birmingham comes soon. But until that fateful day comes, I suppose this has to be done:

(as usual, selecting the pictures will get you bigger pictures)