Altogether spooky

Did you know that even if you toast a bagel to near-blackness and fill it with sandwichy things and pack it away for later, the moisture generated by its own heat will eventually turn it back into the tough, chewy bagel it was before you toasted it? True story, and an annoying one at that!

I’m thinking I might have to start taking the bus to work, as walking is beginning to turn me into the red-faced, overweight, anger-managementless salesman I most certainly am not (maybe in a past life).

Like today, trapped inside a construction site’s man-made pedestrian path, a woman refused to let me pass her. She not only walked ahead of me in an inhumanly slow fashion but then half-turned to me at the end and grinned so that I knew she’d done it on purpose.

And I said, Nice work you stupid twat, now I’m really going to be late! in my head (because I’m not only a stress-case but a cowardly stress-case).

Earlier, I passed a woman with annoyingly perfect legs painted with an annoyingly cool pair of burgundy tights that were perfectly encased in an annoyingly perfect pair of tall black boots. And then five minutes later she ran past me in order to reclaim the lead, only to slow down again. Annoying!

There is a girl I pass each day who doesn’t annoy me – a school girl whose oddness makes me wonder about her.

Face on, she’s nearly two-dimensional, her green eyes a bit feral, her features likely a perfect replica of her mother’s because they make her look much older than she is. Do her threadbare school socks slouch a bit rebelliously? Perhaps. And does her poker-straight hair evenly match the slightly militaristic black boots she wears with her dark skirt and blazer? Most definitely.

She could be part of the Adam’s family, the real one, or in a few years someone’s pierced Gothic Princess fantasy. I know what you’re thinking boys, but hold your horses! First she has to try her luck with the bland, well-adjusted school boys, probably the one with rough elbows, speckled forearms and hair like a flame – No! Like the flame on a purple candle in a black-painted room that lights the bowl of a homemade bong overflowing with hash!

He’s not the most popular boy in school, but you wouldn’t catch him having his lunch surrounded by any less than two or three other boys of his calibre. He kicks balls so hard that if they hit you in the face, nobody would blame you for crying. He can eat three hotdogs in one go at your pool party. He makes wheelie-popping seem easier than throwing a rock through a neighbour’s window, and he blazes past her on his BMX sometimes, expressly to knock the black beret off her head. Oh well.

Ready or not, here she comes, completely at ease in the strangeness of the figure she cuts, that flat portfolio more than half her size tucked neatly beneath one arm as she whistles past you like a fine knife-blade through water. Her name is likely Deborah and she is gonna rock your world one day maybe.

I dunno, I really think I ought to take the bus from now on.