Cocktails and Records

Lots of people are of the mistaken opinion that I am a chilled, laid-back and accepting kind of person. This is completely and utterly not true, and here is the proof.

I recently had to take a 40-minute journey on the tube. This did not bother me. Although the tube is not the most pleasant place to pass time,  it is a good opportunity to immerse oneself  in ‘a good book’.

So I settled down and all was well for a while. Well, until precisely the next stop where a man, a deceptively ordinary-looking man, got on and sat opposite me. He had an old supermarket bag which he placed on his lap. This should have warned me – ever since I witnessed a seatside fight between a cinema-goer and a rustler at the National Film Theatre, I have been weary of men and plastic supermarket bags.

But I digress. This supermarket bag was full of bananas. And the man proceeded to take one out, peel it and eat it, all the time gazing straight ahead into the middle distance behind me. This was fine. He wasn’t staring at me. And he was after all, just a man eating a banana.

Then he ate another. It was at this point that I noticed his Keith from Nuts in May eating style – that kind of slow, methodical, thoughtful chewing where you just know that he is carefully counting the correct number of chews in his head. And still he stared straight-ahead at that mysterious point just behind my right ear.

By the third banana, my skin was beginning to creep and by the fourth, all attempts to concentrate on my book were drowned out by an intense desire to shove it down his throat and choke him with it.

I didn’t wait around to see the fifth banana. As he pulled it from his bag, I leaped to the door and defiantly turned my back on him and his stupid, bloody bananas.

Later, I told my sorry tale to a friend. ‘But’ she said reasonably ‘he was just eating bananas. What’s wrong with that?’. ‘It was the way he was eating them’ I explained. ‘I thought that you Australians were meant to be laid-back.’ was her puzzled, yet completely irritating reply.

She is lucky that I didn’t have a banana on me as I know where I would have placed it.

I had a horrible dream last night that my parents’ house was burning down. In the dream I ran madly around their home trying to rescue all the things we most cherish – Grandpa’s war medals, treasured items of jewellery, favourite books, seemingly endless shelves of my Mum’s carefully arranged photo albums documenting 100 years of family history.

And as the fire engulfed the Swiss Family Robinson style tree house that they were living in (it was a dream you know), I awoke in a panic desperately hoping I’d got to every single one of those bloody photo albums in time.

Awake and in a slightly fevered state, my mind naturally turned to the location of all the items in my house that I needed to save if by chance, it suddenly caught on fire right now.

1. Passports (I’m not going through the hassle of replacing them).
2. A quilt my mother sewed for me.
3. The excellent present that my Aunts gave me for my 18th birthday.
4. The shoebox of letters and postcards from my nearest and dearest.
5. The other shoebox of old photo negs.
6. The external hard drive back-up with the rest of my life on it…

Digital isn’t romantic, but it sure beats lugging piles of photo albums around.

At a meeting with an architect the other day, we were informed that men and women have different tastes when it comes to the interiors of public toilets and restrooms. Men prefer darker colours, wood textures and dimmer lights. Women like a light bright feel, lots of mirrors and pastels. Therefore, men and women’s toilets should have separate designs and colour schemes.

Our party of women was somewhat surprised by this and curious as to where this wisdom came from. It’s common knowledge, the architect arrogantly replied, and what would you know anyway – how many men and women’s loos have you been to in the same place to compare?

He got us there.

Since then I’ve found myself contemplating men’s toilets. So can someone tell me, are they really dark, woody and dim or is this just a load of bunk?

Here are some facts from the current issue of The New Statesman which may or may not cheer you up this grim Tuesday:

1. There are 1.6 billion estimated internet users worldwide.
2. There are 109.2 million blogs.
3. 99% of blogs have no readers.

But if a blog has no readers, is it really a blog?