Sunday 29 July 2007

horn hooted, flags waved.
they stopped the traffic and danced.
we’d just thump people.

I was up Edgware Road today and spent a pleasant hour in the park, writing and dealing with odd green insects who, for their own strange reasons, seemed to find me irresistible.
A woman came to sit on the next bench.
‘Sundays are boring, aren’t they?’
‘Well, they don’t have to be.’
‘I’ve been dealing with my husband..’
I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this, as I was debating whether she was talking sexual services or murder, but before I could formulate a response she continued…
‘He’s broke his hip and he’s been in bed for four weeks.’
‘That must be difficult.’ I said. It’s not that I didn’t feel sorry for the woman, but I suspected she was after a little more than a chat about bedbaths.
I was saved from any further embroilment as just then all hell broke loose and cars started whizzing by, tooting their horns and waving flags out of their windows. It was the Iraqi flag, which I only realised because three teenage boys ran past me with the flag on the front of the T-shirts and IRAQ written in big letters on the back.
‘Have we withdrawn the troops?’ I thought, ‘Is George Bush dead?’
It turned out that Iraq had won the Asian Cup at Football.
By the time I reached Edgware Road itself, traffic was at a standstill and people were out of their cars and dancing in the street, music provided by their state-of-the-art in-car stereo systems.
It was a good half-hour before the police cottoned on and arrived to divert the noisier of the celebrants into the side streets where they could hoot and dance to their hearts’ contents.
I escaped into Marks and Spencers where I bought a bottle of wine.
‘Do you have ID?’ said the twenty-something cashier.
‘What for?’ I asked, bemused.
‘I’m only joking,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I snapped, still smarting from the Bill Oddie comparison, ‘Very funny!’
I will have to do something about my image.
At the tube, I was confronted by another celebrity omen, as who should be walking into the Tube but Ian Reddington, better known as Vernon from ‘Coronation Street’.
What sort of omen is he?
Only Time will tell.