Somebody loves me… I wonder who

Good news, everyone. Particularly for those of you who worry that I will be spending my old age all alone, trapped in spinsterhood and/or a first-floor terraced flat in south-east London, talking to jigsaws in various stages of completion as though they were real, living children. 'Oh, haven't you grown!?' 'Come on, I've baked you this cake, you may as well eat it.'

Because now I know for sure: He is out there. He. The One. Mr Right. Jeff. Whatever you want to call him.

How do I know? Because of this:


I noticed this sticker on a piece of plastic next to my seat during a recent bus journey to Forest Hill. As great bus journeys of the world go, it's not exactly Route 66 by Greyhound, iconically speaking, but you do get to go past the Horniman Museum, and that's not nothing.

I'm particularly alive to the possibility of random bus communications. Once, several years ago, I found the entire lyrics to Bob Dylan's You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go written out on a sheet of paper that was folded up and wedged down the side of my seat. By the time I got off the bus, I was convinced that this was a message meant only for me that had been planted there by a fellow passenger. The copper-bottomed clincher was the line 'Purple heather, Queen Anne lace', which was QUITE CLEARLY a reference to the fact I was wearing a purple cardigan. It remains a mystery to me that I got home that day unkissed.

Anyway. Back to the sticker on the bus, which I think we can all agree was a similar act of direct communication. The literate among you will notice that, tantalisingly, the name of my intended has been partially obscured. I guess you have to work for these things. Anything that's worth having, as Cheryl Cole once declared, is sure enough worth fighting for. Obviously, it didn't work out massively well for Cheryl on that occasion, but you've got to be in it to win it, as someone else more or less definitely must have said at one time or another.

As you might imagine, I have given an awful lot of thought as to the identity of this mystery man (allow me to make this assumption) whose name ends with a penultimate letter of a particular shape, followed by an 's'. Who could it be?

Here is my shortlist:

Oscar Pistorius
Pros: has magic legs; will almost certainly be able to get me tickets for the Olympics and the Paralympics.
Cons: really, really loves exercise – this suggests an issue of quite fundamental incompatibility.

Norman Reedus
Pros: Was in The Walking Dead, so may be able to introduce me to Andrew Lincoln.
Cons: My clear preference for his colleague Andrew Lincoln may prove problematic; has previously had to resort to dating the likes of Helena Christensen, so may understandably feel I am somewhat out of his league, looks-wise.

Andrew Sachs
Pros: Struggling here. Mild-mannered? Can perform amusing if politically fraught foreign accents?
Cons: Considerable age gap; feel that I would have little to say to his daughter.

Inspector Rebus
Pros: I love a Scottish man.
Cons: Feel very strongly that I already have far too many intimate relationships with fictional characters. These include, but are not limited to, Josh Lyman from The West Wing; 'Beast' from the Disney film Beauty & The Beast; Will Ladislaw; Kenny from Press Gang; Carver from The Wire (later series only); Kermit.

Bruce Willis
Pros: Fictionally brave.
Cons: Strongly dislike men in vests.

Mumford & Sons
Pros: You wait years for a man to come along, then four appear at once, playing folk-lite festival anthems. Not entirely convinced this constitutes a 'pro'.
Cons: Think I would feel more comfortable in a conventional one-on-one relationship; strongly dislike men in waistcoats.

Keith Harris
Pros: Seems sensitive.
Cons: Feel I'm not ready to be a stepmother to a child, let alone a family of manually animated puppets. Suspect their presence in the relationship would be unhealthy, especially in the bedroom. I am old-fashioned that way.

I am hoping very much that this is not a definitive list.

A good heart is hard to find

What can you do when such a grim weekend presents itself? My remedy has been chips, ice cream, curry and therapeutically crying my face off at the final Harry Potter film.

And also making a list of all the blog posts I've meaning to write over the last couple of months and not getting round to.

And then posting one of them. This one.

It's starting now.

Here it is.

Ready?

No, do that later. This won't take long.

It's just this: a heart drawn on a window pane by some previous inhabitant of a B&B room in Yorkshire.

As signs go, it can't be seen until the new occupants of the room decide to make a cup of tea, and then it silently reveals itself – a simple masterpiece rendered in invisible finger ink on a steam and glass canvas. One pair of lovers – Heathcliff and Cathy in cagoules, coming in from the wild blast of the moors outside, rosy-cheeked and never-more-alive, peeling off their layers, popping on the kettle – feeling compelled to share a message of uncontainable desire with those who followed in their footsteps.

I, however, was sharing the room with my mum so the romance was pretty much wasted on me.

In which I simply can't bear it

Some years ago I sat talking to a man in an office. He was, in a strictly professional capacity, attempting to help me prise loose the nuts, bolts and screws of my nervous system, which I had spent the previous few years winding tighter and tighter until the strain upon it was such I was likely to explode at any moment, showering a five-mile radius with highly concentrated anxiety, neat grief and scraps of singed cardigan.

As a species, he told me, we are more anxious than we have ever been. While the worries of our ancestors were extreme but elemental, he said, today we are constantly assailed by a more complicated and wide-ranging set of risks. And we can't handle it. Specifically, I wasn't handling it. Sociologically, we have evolved at an exponential rate and our sweating, straining biology just can't keep up with these new demands. (See also: fertility – although you may not have heard about the decline in women's reproductive potential in their mid-to-late 30s because, really, magazines and newspapers HARDLY EVER MENTION IT.)

On Saturday, in broad daylight, surrounded by people who would easily have heard my cries for help, I was confronted by A Thing that genuinely terrifies me, that gives my fight or flight response an aggressive poke with a sharp yet gnarly stick.


A person in a costume with a large head. My eyes my eyes MYEYES. I don't care if you are collecting for charity, person inside the bear suit, YOU ARE GIVING ME THE CREEPS.

I have only just recovered from the freakish, beaming, big-headed Mickey Mouse I had to have my photo taken with about a decade ago on a jolly work excursion to EuroDisney. For months, years, after, I would see his huge, hollow black eyes and blank grin looming towards me whenever I turned the lights off and tried to sleep.

Anywhere there is 'family fun', giant costumes follow. And anywhere you find them, you will not find me, as I will be taking cover behind some bouncy castle or other or, in this case, the Paddington station branch of Bagel Factory, panic levels ascending.

I'm not sure whether this counts as a primitive fear, or a modern one. In some senses, maybe this fun, furry Paddington Bear represents the wild beast who is coming to destroy my family and homestead. Yet on a deeper level, I think it tickles some more sophisticated, subtle reflex which concerns enforced fun and not knowing exactly the right way to talk to a person in a giant animal costume.

Also, it just looks really weird and freaky.

I am going to bed now, where I fully expect to slip into a sweet dream about some beloved or other, only to roll over in my bed, stretch out my arm and feel it fall on the scratchy wool of duffel coat. I will open my eyes to see a giant Paddington Bear bearing down on me, about to suffocate me with an enormous marmalade sandwich and then I won't know if it is a dream any more...

In Which I Learn That I Am (Not Quite) A Cult Figure

It's disconcerting to turn around on a busy tube train, in the pursuit of a fresher source of air, to find yourself confronted by a version of... well... you.

On the Jubilee Line last week, one of my fellow commuters had a badge pinned to her bag which bore an uncanny hand-drawn likeness to yours truly, Miss Jones of south-east London. It gave me quite a start. Not exactly like looking in a mirror – I have a Dickensian pallor, this much is true, but my face isn't actually grey. These are minor details, though. I firmly believed it to be a deliberate portrait of me.

Now, of course, if my life was a film, the camera would pan with me as I slowly turned round to see another badge with my face on it, several feet away, perhaps on the lapel of some emo kid's beaten up blazer. I turn some more, and see myself on a cotton resuable shopping bag. Another 30º, and there I am again, and again, on a bobble hat, on a satchel, on a scarf. I. Am. Everywhere. Everywhere, there is me. The world is me.

Sadly, my life is not a film, and I think we all know that is Hollywood's loss.

Still, someone had seen fit to create a badge with my face on it. That means that the person who I stood very near to last week is attempting to create some kind of Cult Of Miss Jones. It wouldn't appear to be going massively well since, currently, no one else seems to be sporting the official Miss Jones badge, despite the fact that she has almost certainly – no, definitely, most definitely – made 500 of them and, at the time of manufacture, was keenly anticipating a repeat order. Probably there is a box of them in her hall which she bumps into every time she's putting her coat on as she leaves for work, all of an a.m. hurry. Probably she lies awake at night wondering when the others will see the light – and also see her elaborate city-wide poster campaign featuring my face and the words 'She is coming to save us' – and join her. Come to think of it, I haven't even seen those posters, so she really needs to roll her sleeves up and crack on with the mass publicity.

It's probably a good job she didn't turn around and see me. Who knows what would have happened. Exultation? Speaking in tongues? I can barely have a wash and do my own jeans up first thing in the morning, let alone deal with a weeping fanatic falling at my feet in a train carriage somewhere between Westminster and Green Park. What I – and she – would really like to know at this point is this: why EXACTLY isn't the Cult Of Miss Jones catching on? Why does she have 500 unused badges in a box in her hall? Why, as cult figures go, am I a cult figure? I am a cult figure squared, and I don't much like it.

I think I need to perform some kind of miracle to truly build my profile. But what? Hmm. I can't swim, but maybe that's because my natural inclination when it comes to water is to walk on it – and I just never realised before. Do let me know if you have a miracle you would like me to perform in order that I can join the ranks of more high-profile cult leaders. You will win a Cult Of Miss Jones badge, and your chosen feat of amazement actioned.*

To be continued.

*You will not win this.

Correspondence Part I

Here is a breakdown of my average postal delivery in one week:

4 x letters from estate agents telling me they have just let property on my street. It is an extremely long street. This does not impress me.

6 x assorted loan offers from various financial companies.

1 x article my mum has cut out for me from the Sunday Times on ways to either a) increase my income or b) meet men*.

2 x letters from Virgin Media imploring me to give them my Broadband business BUT I NEVER WILL, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME? EVEN IF YOU GAVE IT TO ME FOR FREE, I STILL WOULD NOT BECAUSE OF YOUR HATEFUL AND INCESSANT STREAM OF UNINVITED CORRESPONDANCE.

Any 2 of the following: bank statement, payslip, bill.

2 x catalogues from smug middle-class, 'quality' clothes companies with adorable, rosy-cheeked children in brightly coloured wellies on the cover, companies I have never ordered from, yet who arrived in my life just as I started ticking the 33 and over age box, as suddenly and unwelcome...ly as back fat and monstrously hard skin on the soles of my feet did at around the same time.

Number of items of genuine, personal, non-financial, addressed-to-me-by-hand correspondence: appoximately 0.2 (based on receiving one item around every 5 weeks).

So you can imagine my giddy excitement when I came home to find a crisp, cream envelope that bore my name and address, written in an elegant hand, waiting for me on the communal shelf in our communal hallway.

I took it into my flat, sat on my sofa and looked at it for a little while, enjoying the promise of genuine human contact contained within. Whatever was inside would inevitably prove to be a disappointment, so I allowed myself to bathe in the potentiality before I uncovered the hollow truth. Life taught me to be pessimistic at a young age, when Jim'll Fix It did not respond to my letter.

But I was wrong. Inside was a card written to me by a shop assistant who had sold me some perfume in Jo Malone about six weeks before. I had thought the time we spent together discussing woody florals and uplifting citrus meant nothing to her. Oh, foolish, foolish girl.

Aww. R had sat down, after a hard day of spraying perfume on white shards of card for indecisive idiots like me, to write to her valued customers, no photocopying, no Dear Sir/Madam, no automatic franking machine, but instead tender strokes of biro and stamps. Stamps! I was, whatever flippant showing off is to follow, genuinely pleased to receive her card and impressed by her superior approach to customer service (NB: she does not have a Saturday job in Bromley, as far as I am aware, and is over the age of 20).

Now I'm not entirely sure how to respond.

Should I write back?

'Dear R, how lovely to hear from you. I hope you have been well. You must be very excited about the new English Pear & Freesia fragrance rolling out across stores nationwide in September. I know I am! I've had the week off work, so I've been able to up my pitiful blog-post rate temporarily. Too bad no one told the weather I was on holiday! Looking forward to catching up with you soon and don't work too hard! Fondest regards, Miss Jones x'

Hmm.

On the another hand, perhaps I should surprise her by waiting outside the shop until I can see, through the window, that she has her back turned, then sneak in and put my hands over her eyes and say 'Guess who?!' (I may disguise my voice at this point. I do quite a good Loyd Grossman. Or one particular group of ex-colleagues used to love it when I did the voice of the pineapple from the old TipTop advert.) Then when she prises my hands from her eyes – her voice rising in borderline panic/irritation – and turns round, I'll give her a massive hug and ask her if she wants to pop out and get some lunch with me.

Maybe I could take her in a tuna sandwich and a latte.

This is ridiculous, of course.

She might be a vegetarian. I should make it egg mayonnaise.

* I should say that I would be very sad indeed if she stopped doing this.

Nearly man

On Thursday lunchtime, at 1.24pm, this voicemail was left on my phone:

'Hi Tamsin, it's Steve. I'm just... er... trying to catch up with you. I'm not sure if I've made a mistake but I'm at the Royal Opera House, kind of... hoping to meet up with you. [High-pitched nervous laugh]. So if you could give me a call, if you're about, if you're on your way or… if I've got the wrong day, please let me know. Thanks. Bye.'

Steve sounded like he was sweating through his shirt – possibly wishing he'd worn a different one. Steve sounded like Studied Insouciance grappling with High Anxiety. High Anxiety had Studied Insouciance on the ropes.

Steve sounded nice, really.

I couldn't say for certain that it was a date Steve and Tamsin were ineffectually trying to arrive together at. Perhaps it was a business meeting or a friendly lunch. Perhaps it was a friendly lunch that Steve was hoping might turn into a date. Perhaps Steve definitely did think it was a date, and Tamsin definitely didn't. It seems like Tamsin might not have been thinking of it at all.

I am a worrier by nature, and I felt worried about Steve, so I texted him. I told him he had left a voicemail on the wrong phone but that I hoped he had managed to find Tamsin. As much as I tried to suppress my usual sentimental extrapolation of the facts, thoughts like 'Imagine if he texted you back expressing his confusion at the mores of modern dating and you replied in sympathetic solidarity and this is how you met your future husband' and 'Imagine telling this story in 40 years' time at a big family lunch in the garden in front of your and Steve's 12 adorable, adoring grandchildren' and 'Do you remember when something like this happened to Kenny on Press Gang? I wish Kenny from Press Gang was a real person. He was lovely' kept curling a tentacle around my consciousness.

All these things ran through my head, quite against my wishes, as I texted Steve.

Steve did not reply.

The cheese man cometh

I was walking along Borough High Street at lunchtime today, on my way to pick up a very reasonably priced and delicious mediterranean salad from Tas, when behind me I heard the clatter of carton on pavement. I am extremely squeamish about the dropping of litter, as was my father – it is genetic – so my senses are always on high alert and have subsequently become five times more sensitive than the average human.

Behind me, and on the other side of some wire fencing, a construction worker was side-footing a milk carton, still a quarter full, into a medium-sized hole in the road.

A medium-sized hole like this. Well, not like this. Actually this:

The milk carton was followed by a yogurt pot, casually jettisoned into the doom.

While I was digusted by this man's approach to waste management, I was impressed by his commitment to calcium consumption. I imagine strong bones must be a boon in that kind of job.

Still, I was unable to remonstrate with the offender. Chiefly, because he was quite hard-looking and I felt a bit scared of him, with his fluorescent gilet and shaved head and outdoor-employment tan. Furthermore, even if I had the courage of my convictions - and one day soon I really plan to – to the extent where a proper confrontation was a real possibility, I would have had to shin over the red wire fences which were higher than my head, and if you know anything about me, you will know that I am not cut out for The Krypton Factor.

Also, I was REALLY hungry. I wanted those dolmas real bad.

But still, while I was eating them, I kept thinking about those dregs of dairy produce, soon to be buried beneath the road. A quarter of a pint of milk. Some smearings of yoghurt. What if that man did the same thing every day for the duration of Borough High Street's roadworks (which, let me tell you, Southwark council, feels like a lifetime)? Ate and drank the same things? More and more cow juice, accumulating in some kind of mucusy landfill.

I'm no expert, but it must, eventually, fuse into some kind of cheese product, coagulating and curding beneath the feet of thousands of city dwellers for days and weeks and months.

And what happens then?

Gradually, gradually, people who are lactose intolerant start experiencing minor symptoms when they pass over the site. Suddenly, sinuses feel bothered. Eczema blooms. Bathrooms are sought with increasing urgency. Soon people are scurrying from the site in all directions, clutching stomachs, scratching skin, rubbing eyes, blowing noses...

Around those areas filled in by the roadworkers, tiny cracks appear. The smell of cheese starts to pervade - at first merely suggesting there may be a pizza restaurant nearby. Then a branch of Neal's Yard Dairy. Then it is simply an overpowering stench, which you can only walk past if you have your sleeve pressed over your nose.

If you spend any length of time in the area, as opposed to just bustling past (perhaps you work in the office opposite and have a window on the street), you might eventually discern those new areas of tarmac rising and falling, rhythmically, almost imperceptibly.

Somebody is breathing underneath. Or something.

Then one day, the cracks begin to burst open. Two thick, terrible yellow arms emerge, lifting up the tarmac above it like one giant black biscuit and hurling it to one side. And an enormous cheese colussus climbs out and pulls itself up to its full height, towering over people and structures.

It starts to stumble through the streets, terrifying all inhabitants, except for the city's mice who are kind of excited. It is hunting down the construction worker who started it all.

He will not drop litter any more.

Fangs for shopping at Sainsbury's

Vampires, blah blah. All around us, etc etc. We've been here before.

And now they've been in the fruit aisle at Dog Kennel Hill Sainsbury's.

Don't you sometimes crave something sharp to cut through all that haemoglobin? It just makes your mouth so... claggy.

'Gym? Your name is gym?'*

It's true that I don't much like gyms at the best of times – they smell funny and they play terrible music – but you can't tell me this isn't a little bit sinister:


I'm not sure if it's the steps descending into tomb-like oblivion, or how gothic the logo's typographical flourishes seem when rendered in white on black. Whichever, it smacks of infernal nightmares.

What happens inside? Are people being sacrificed on toning tables? (My use of the expression 'toning tables' is indicative of the last time I was in a gym.) Are people doing their combat training bare knuckle? Against snarling yellowed-eyed hounds? Are lost souls wailing and crying and tearing at their own skin because there's no fluffy towels left and they're having to use their own scratchy ones from home?

The sun was shining, but my blood was chilled as I went on my way.

* You win a prize† if you can identify this film quotation. It utilises a pun on gym/Jim**.
† You do not win a prize.
** I may not be quoting it entirely accurately.
Good luck!

Salad days

If you are in the market for a salad spinner, and you're on a budget, I can help you. There was one abandoned on my street this week. I saw it on my way to choir practice. I cannot guarantee that it had not been used as a latrine by passing wildlife – canine, volpine, humine. Any port in a storm.

Not that one ever seems to actively acquire a salad spinner. Has anyone ever bought one? They just seem to find themselves in your kitchen, stoutly defending their corner of a cupboard, all sturdy plastic and 70s colour scheme. An incongruous out-of-timer in an era of pre-packed salad and all its easy charms. A beige alien.

When I was little, a popular strand of storytelling by and for the young involved extraordinary, implausible, unresolvable adventure, culminating in the 'all a dream' get-out. Ninety-nine point seven per cent of the stories I wrote ended like this, fifty-two point seven per cent of the ones I read.

But eventually I learnt what I considered to be a highly sophisticated modulation. When the dreamer awoke to find themselves back in their own world, they would also find some kind of souvenir from the alternate reality they had slumbered themselves into. It wasn't a dream at all! Or was it? Or wasn't it? Or was it?

How could you deny your presence in another dimension, when right in front of your very eyes was an exotic shell, a pair of gloves, a quill, a salad spinner? How else could it have got there?

In which a man named Joe Cooper does not move into the flat downstairs and, as a result, I do not end up marrying him

(Originally intended date of posting: early October 2009)

In the autumn of 2009, a man whom I had never met before did not move into the ground floor flat downstairs. His name was, and may still be, Joe Cooper.

Although Joe Cooper did not move in, he had most definitely planned to and I was excited by this news. The outgoing neighbour, Reuben, had spoken of Joe Cooper's tallness and excellent manners when he came to look around. Also, let us consider the name Joe Cooper, and how it suggests dashing youth and handsome old age, rolled up shirt sleeves and distracting forearms, thick hair and good manners and an aura of Sporty but Not In A Weird Way.

I don't know why Joe Cooper did not move in, but I know we were kept apart by a matter of a cruel few days. The evidence? A card I found on our shared doormat that said 'Dear Mr Cooper, we tried to install your Sky+ today, but you weren't in.' Even now, months later, post still drops optimistically through the communal letterbox for him.

Here are the things I do know for sure about Joe Cooper:

1) From the envelopes addressed to him, stamped with the names of wealth asset management companies, he has a certain amount of disposable income.

2) He has Sky TV.

From my perspective at least, our prospects looked excellent. But my potential future with Joe Cooper now exists entirely in the negative, thanks to some caprice of bounced deposit cheques or eccentric letting agents.

In the autumn of 2009, I did not watch furtively from behind my bedroom curtains as Joe Cooper unpacked his life from the boot of a mid-range small car and carried it into the flat below. I did not mentally judge him a little bit with every emerging possession, which included an enormous television (tick), an ugly heirloom-style coffee table (endearing), several items to indicate an enthusiasm for Manchester United (fail, crashing fail) and an enormous rucksack suggesting he'd Been Travelling (undecided). At around this time, I realised my bedroom curtains could use a wash.

Three weeks later, I did not meet him for the first time in our communal corridor, having been meaning to knock and say hello like a grown-up ever since he moved in, but always finding an excuse not to. We did not have a flustered but well-meaning conversation where we occasionally talked over each other in our attempts to be welcoming (my side) and Not Totally Odd (both sides).

At some point after this, Joe Cooper did not knock on my door and ask if he could borrow some pliers, and then, while I was foraging for them in the Cupboard Of Things Which Have No Other Home, he did not browse my DVD collection, remarking in gently disparaging terms on my fondness for fey indie romcoms and recommending instead some Acclaimed US Drama with Courtroom Slash Police Slash Military Action.

At Christmas 2009, I did not receive a courtesy invitation to a drinks party at Joe Cooper's flat, at which I decided, after considerable deliberation, that none of Joe Cooper's friends were as attractive as Joe Cooper.

In the early spring 0f 2010, after a string of increasingly less coincidental meetings in the hallway, we did not end up watching some significant occasion of football together, thanks to his Sky Sports subscription. This, in turn, did not lead to us attending a local pub quiz together, which I would subsequently refer to as our first date, although Joe Cooper would never agree (we would later participate in nauseating play-arguments about this point of conjecture at friends' dinner parties). During the evening, Joe Cooper did not talk at length about the months he'd spent travelling (I bloody knew it), the exact period of time that seemed lost from my life expectancy after listening to him go on about it. Yet by the end of this evening, he had won a consolation-prize brewery-branded tankard, as well as the return of my previously diminishing affections, with his knowledge of historical battles and heavyweight champions of the world.

By late spring, there had not become officially a Thing.

By early summer, I had not told my friends that there was not a Thing, to which they did not respond with the following: 'I knew this would happen.' 'The one with the arms?' 'So now you can use the garden whenever you like?'

By August, I had not met his parents, thawing the initial froideur of his father with a homemade fruitcake, and successfully engaging his Dad Skills in fixing one of my lamps.

Over the next 12 months, Joe Cooper did not take me to task about my hostility to social events and general remoteness, gradually eroding them, while I attempted to do the same with his Manchester United memorabilia, to moderate success.

After some time, Joe Cooper and I did not begin attending friends' weddings together, studiously avoiding eye contact during the ceremony and performing tag-team interminable talking at anyone we met there to prevent any lull in the conversation in which they might ask us whether we 'would be next'.

Throughout these months, I was not constantly suppressing the urge to ask Joe Cooper wild-eyed, pseudo-peri-menopausal questions about whether he wanted children and how soon, how soon exactly, at some point in the next year, at some point in his 40s, when, when, when, I mean there's plenty of time and everything but WHEN.

I did not then embark on a campaign of inviting only my friends who had the most adorable and immaculately behaved children over for long Sunday lunches. I absolutely did not do this.

During this time, Joe Cooper and I did not spend interminable evenings talking about whether to move out of our upstairs-downstairs flat arrangement, in favour of one bigger flat, or whether to call in a lifestyle-magazine-style architect to create a ladder-and-hatch arrangement through the middle of both flats, before, inevitably, failing to do either and living in his (for the garden), while mine became a refuge for our joint collection of VHS tapes, unwanted family-heirloom coffee tables and only partially loved sporting memorabilia.

Eventually, Joe Cooper did not mumble a proposal during a European city break, an evening I subsequently marred by ordering a ridiculous dessert and then feeling sick. There did not follow a city wedding in which our families were polite to each other, our friends were well behaved, their children less so, and everyone toasted our long and happy future.

Joe Cooper did not move in, so we never met, so we will never know.

Tree, slain

(originally intended date of posting: December 12th, 2009)

There I was, walking to the train station, thinking about all the incredibly important and complicated things I usually think about on my regular 13-minute morning constitutional, when I saw this in front of me:


A tree, fallen, sprawling on the street.

It had not been a particularly windy night. There were no attendants in fluoroescent gilets declaring the area a hazard, no tree surgeons pondering its demise, no buzzing of chain saws or hauling of ropes, no triangular signs warning of its imminent descent and subsequent removal and apologies for any inconvenience caused.

There was just a tree lying on the pavement.

A tree that, with no evidence to the contrary, appeared to have fallen of natural causes, wrenching itself free of its foundations. Perhaps it took some kind of funny turn, botanically speaking, and swooned on to the tarmac below, clasping at the railings with its branches on the way down, in an attempt to break its fall. 'Is it hot out here? I feel a bit... ooh, look out down there!'

Since there was no prohibitive red and white tape to stop me, I walked on past the tree. I was this close to it. Something about the scale of it made me feel a bit queasy. Trees are really, really big when they're lying down. And this one looked horribly undignified, lying prostrate and vulnerable to attack from any road or pavement dweller. I am particularly thinking of the under 5s on their ill-controlled scooters in what is a very busy area for young families.

Basically, what I kept thinking was, 'Aslan.'

I was so distressed I found myself wondering whether there was a slim chance that any part of it could still be alive, and at what point a tree technically dies, but I decided that when it had been 100% severed from its roots, that point had almost certainly become history. Even I, ludicrous, twee fantasist, had to concede that it was unlikely to open a pair of barky eyes and say, 'This is terribly embarrassing but could you help me up? I feel such an old fool.'

The next morning, every trace of it had disappeared, except:

and:

What had become of it? Where had they taken it? I would never know, but if I had an open fire, I would be thinking twice about tossing a fresh log on to it.

Beware the Dreadlock Of Unusual Size

There are a great many Things about London, and one of those Things is that on any day, a day that may start just like all the others, you can suddenly notice a person in the street that you've never seen before. And then, the day after that, you might see them again, and you wonder how this should be, and why they've suddenly arrived in your life, and where they've been up until this point, and what the men who sit in the high, high cabins of construction cranes above the city who, as everyone knows, orchestrate everything that goes on on the streets beneath them, have in store for the pair of you.

And then you never see them again and the drudge consumes you once more, and you forget any of those thoughts that went before.

Yesterday, on the short journey between London Bridge and Southwark Street, I found myself walking behind this man and his… well, I would like to call it a mono-dreadlock, but it was not working alone. However, its considerable girth far outstripped that of its siblings. In keeping with my ongoing fad for allusions to the icons of 80s light entertainment, in the dreadlock Roly-Polys, this one was definitely Mo.

Then, this morning, I found myself following the same man and his prolifically unwashed hair once again and I was gripped by a chilly terror – that the end of that dreadlock would rear up towards me like a furry, unwashed cobra, and two beady red eyes would open, and a terrible, tiny jaw would unlock, and a set of pernicious, pointy little teeth would come right for me. I am slightly scared to go to bed tonight for fear that this is a portrait that will have been painted inside my closed eyelids. It is the night of the living dreadlock.

P is for puzzle and also for pitch

My name is Miss Jones, and I am a freak.

My friend and former flatmate, Ms H, likes to say there is an episode of Seinfeld for all of life's eventualities. I think that's what she says. Some people, and they are mostly idiots, and in all likelihood idiots I have worked with, think there is an episode of Sex & The City for every facet of the female 30-something experience. I don't agree, although when I came in the other night, there was one on where Miranda was mistaken for a lesbian, and it did strike something of a chord. 

Anyway, one episode that I do respond to essentially preaches that we are all freaks at some level. I am no exception. And one strange little victory that brings unbridled joy to my deformed, freaky soul is finding an abandoned copy of G2 on the train with none of the puzzles on the back filled in. Or the Times 2. I also like the Times 2. Of course, I could just buy my own copy, but that is not at all the point. It's just a freaky thing that brings me pleasure because I am a freak.

The other day, on the way home, I found both. 

I know! I couldn't believe it either. It was the Holy Grail. I did the double. The G2 cup and the T2 premiership. I don't know what I'm saying now. But basically, it was amazing.

Well, almost. Like a thirsty man roaming the desert, I saw only what I wanted to see. On closer inspection, someone had had a bit of a go at the G2 crossword. 

Before tossing it aside, like an abandoned newspaper on a train, he had filled in the answers 'Abbey Road', 'Observatory', 'Bob',  'Voodoo', 'Olympus', 'Teddy' and 'Rice paper'. In very light writing, he'd also tentatively added 'Garish', 'Rematch' and 'Hoe'. 

So what can we tell about the mind of the person who got this far and threw it away? 

First, the negatives. They appear ill-travelled. They struggled with 'Map-making (11)', although they knew it ended in '-graphy'. They couldn't attempt so much as a syllable of 'Rice wine used in Japanese cookery (5)'  or a clue to which the answer was Champs Elysées.

However, looking at the positives, and applying actual scientific psychology, they would seem to like macaroons, astronomy and The Beatles. On paper – literally! on paper! on a newspaper! – we would get on fabulously. Perhaps there is a romantic comedy in this. Male lead half completes the crossword every day on the train. Always sits in the same seat. He gets off. She gets on. She being female lead. Always sits in the same seat. His seat. Completes the rest of the crossword. Completes him, etc. Will they ever meet? One morning she resolves to get a look at him, so has a breakneck dash to an earlier station down the line to get on the train before he gets off. Her car takes ages to start. Her car is a make that kooky women in romantic comedies drive. It is almost certainly raining. A crocodile of adorable but s-l-o-w-walking Montessori children dawdle along a zebra crossing in front of her car while important minutes seep away. She dashes on to the train as the doors are closing, leaving a shoe on the platform. Heads for their seat. But someone else got there before him that morning, some grim-faced old walrus. Surely that is not the man whose newspaper she shares, whose biro imprint she loves? Is it? But the real co-crossworder was also late to the same station, missing the train but finding her shoe on the platform. This may represent a confusion of source material. But anyway, what I'm saying is, crosswords are the new sex. Kakuro is the new foreplay. Although I always like to do the Kakuro last.

Being Miss Jones

Early last week, I took a large bag of my unwanted books to Oxfam on Drury Lane. I left the bag in the shop's dumb waiter of a lift, as they like you to, and headed off in search of my lunch. I am stuck in a rut, lunch-wise, but that is a different post. I walked past Oxfam a few days later, and there in the window, front and centre of the display, was one of my ex-books (I mean to say it was still a book, I was no longer its owner). 

It was a very proud moment.  

This is because I regularly take bagfuls of my former life to the Mind shop in Dulwich, and in the 10 years or so that I have lived in the area, I have never, ever seen any of my items in the shop, let alone enjoying the prestige of a place in the window. Books, mugs, bags, shoes and skirts have disappeared behind the glass counter, never to be seen again. Over the years, I've spent some long grey afternoons of the soul wondering why this is. Could it really be the case that all my old stuff is a) horrible or b) shit? So much so that people will not even claim it in return for a minimal charitable donation? 

While it's true that I no longer want those things around me any more, I still feel a certain attachment to them, and some near-maternal need to protect them from criticism. Perhaps some items of clothing I have deposited in the Mind shop could be described as a little bit horrible. Some CDs, I will concede, may have been slightly shit. But this is the creed of charity shops and online auctions – one woman's horrible is another's amazing and oh-so-me. And one listener's shit is another's edgy and I've-always-wanted-this. So where, cherry-picking charity-shop staff, fillers of shelves and hangers of hangers, is my old stuff? 

This is what I think. Somewhere in the bowels of the Mind shop in Dulwich, someone is living my life, just a short lapse of time behind me, the genuine article. As I type, they're writing their twee blog about, oh, the last series of Strictly Come Dancing or something, tugging uncomfortably at an optimistically purchased pair of leggings, and realising – in eventual accordance with everyone they know – that the hat on their head should probably have remained in Topshop. Perhaps they are listening to a CD single by Eagle-Eye Cherry and wondering about the ethics of giving away unloved presents. 

I'm flattered, obviously. Perhaps I should be doing something to save them from making the same mistakes as me – from staying in when they should be going out, from choosing the apple crumble instead of the chocolate tart. But while I'm still bumbling my way through more days than I glide, ineffectually striving for poise and serenity and tidy hair, and making ill-judged jokes in socially stressful situations, it is doubtful they could really learn anything. 

At the very least though, I could probably exercise enough mercy to save them from 500 pages or so of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

The love song of Miss Jones

I have fallen in love with far more inanimate objects than I have human beings. I don't know why this is and I don't care to dwell on it. 

But I can tell you that I do have a 'type'. Clothes.

This week, I cannot stop thinking about the most beautiful black sleeveless cashmere cardigan from Whistles which I tried on at the weekend. It is £95. 

Now we are involved in a romantic, but as yet unconsummated relationship. I realised this as I replayed the widescreen film of us in my head for the 356th time, the one where we're walking together through the park, kicking up piles of autumn leaves with my Gap biker boots (which I thought I loved once, but which meant nothing as soon as I met the cardigan), and then fat drops of rain start to fall, and we run laughing through the shower to take shelter under an enormous tree because the cardigan is dry clean only. 

The fact is, I honestly love it. I mean it this time. I've never felt like this before. It's like I'm a better person when I'm with it. I'm the person I always wanted to be. I smile all the time, and only I know why. 

I'm finding myself defending it to concerned and sceptical friends with loyal, red-faced indignation. Yes, I know it's not much to look at, but you don't know it like I do. You don't know what it can do. I know it's out of my league, but we have so much in common. It would get on so well with all my other clothes. All those Primark cardigans meant nothing to me.

Yet still I am afflicted by a paralysing lack of nerve. With its upmarket price tag, I dare not quite reach out and make the move that would bring us together. So I have resolved to wait, and hope that the seductive excitement of the sale season will see me losing my inhibitions, and then it will tumble into, and then onto, my arms. But what if I do wait, and find it's too late? Someone else may snap it up while I was waiting in the shadows, worrying about trivialities like budget. I'll have lost it forever and will be left to think of what might have been. 

If you'll excuse me, I must go and lie on my bed and stare at a picture of it while listening to some soft-rock ballads.

In which I attempt to show some respect but then immediately undermine myself with the usual twee trivia

Two important events on the world calendar which seem to regularly intersect on this day each year are the Remembrance Sunday commemorations at the Cenotaph, and my dear friend Miss R's birthday lunch. Today, as last year, I found myself walking out of Charing Cross Station against the mighty tide of former servicemen, their families, and random respect-payers, all of them engaged in a) taking photos b) effecting some kind of impressive near-march, even when at ease and c) looking extraordinarily proud and dignified. This year, as last year, it was all I could do not to arrive at lunch with my cheeks sluiced with tears and mascara. 

I was momentarily distracted, though, from my feelings of privileged youth, sadness and inadequacy by the glorious sight of a handsome young man arm-in-arm with a very frail elderly serviceman. I know not what their relationship was – grandson and grandfather, younger military man assigned to mind an older one for the day, neighbours perhaps – but, with numbing predictability, it did make me fall in love with Serviceman Jr a bit. 

Let me flailingly attempt to convince you that this should in no way detract from my respect and admiration for Those Who Served. I'm just being honest – which is one of the worst ever excuses used by people who habitually say utterly repellant things.

But still, it did make me think how ridiculously impressionable I am when it comes to such acts of perceived kindness and dotherightthing-ness. I could never imagine buying a calendar with photographs of brawny, built beefcakes, but I would be first in the queue for one that featured skinny/paunchy/balding/hirsute/geeky/freaky/average men involved in acts of charity and compassion. Naturally, I would be inviting today's hero (yes, yes, one of many, of course) to be Mr November, but I'm hastily brainstorming in anticipation of the others. I'm thinking:

• Man doggedly rattling charity collection tin outside supermarket in driving rain.
• Man carrying suitcase down very long tube escalator for elderly lady, struggling to disguise the fact that even he is finding it really fucking heavy.
• Bus driver waiting for infirm geriatric to find a seat and sit down safely in it before flooring the accelerator.
•  The man who jumped onto the railway tracks at East Dulwich station one morning to rescue my Birkenstock after it had fallen there during a train-boarding bundle from which I emerged very much the loser.
• Man grinning broodily at stranger's baby on public transport.
  
• Man giving up seat on bus/train/other for someone not necessarily over 80/nine months pregnant.
  
• Man with cat in vet's waiting room, clearly about to cry at any moment. Actually, this might be a bit weird.

I am thinking a reality show. I am thinking a feature film. Mugs! Tea towels! Christ! I am sitting on a goldmine. But you understand I would obviously be donating all proceeds to charity.

Anyway, after lunch, I can only presume that a residual surge of hormones was responsible for me splashing out a ludicrous amount of money on what I can only describe as a Non-Essential Coat. I had put some money aside for a proper non-H&M, non-Primark, actually warm winter coat. By this I mean I had put the money aside in my head. By this I mean I hadn't put any actual, real money aside at all and had carried on frittering it away as usual on trifles. Real and metaphorical. So there was no money for a Proper Winter Coat, let alone money for a flimsy but incredibly chic mac that was also a little bit like a parka, but was unlikely to stand up to a light shower, let alone snow. But that's what I bought.

In my defence, however, a) I had liked it for ages – like, at least three weeks – and b) it is in no way modish or destined to be totally unwearable next season. Therefore, to invoke Shopping Lies We Tell Ourselves No. 426, it is An Investment. Another boon is that when I am wearing it, I feel as though I am channelling Mariella Frostrup at the Hay-On-Wye festival. All I need is a pair of Cath Kidston wellies, and my own Radio 4 show cannot be far away.

Stratford, Sweden, sweet dreams

I have returned from a few days away in Stratford Upon Avon, with Mrs Jones and David Tennant. Unlikely companions, but welcome, both. I can report that David Tennant has shiny hair, ladies' fingers and enough nervous energy to power most of the developed world. He is also pretty good at playing Hamlet. Patrick Stewart, who we saw leaving the theatre by the back door, may be a colossus of the stage, and one of the nation's most attractive 68-year-olds, but sadly, even he is powerless to resist the kind of leather blouson jacket so curiously beloved of his peer group.

Now I have returned to the capital, as reluctantly as ever. 

Sometimes, like defrosting the freezer compartment or visiting the dentist, there is simply nothing to be done but to go to IKEA. Today was such a day. My windows needed blinds, my pictures needed frames, my heavy heart needed lifting – I felt little optimism about any of the above.

Who are all the people wandering around IKEA in the daytime? They cannot all be like me – driven to part-time work by bereavement and illness, yet now rejoicing in its flexibility, if not its financial rewards. If any of them are unemployed, they should really think about getting jobs in IKEA, then maybe their once-fellow customers would be able to find someone to fucking well help them once in a while, instead of being condemned to wander around like severed souls in purgatory, driven mad by the incessant drumming of rain on the store roof and the repeated grating of one's achilles by the inferior trolley control of whoever walks behind.

IKEA did little this afternoon to alter its reputation as perpetual purveyor of disappointment. In short, and you will not be surprised by this, my windows still need blinds and my pictures still want for frames. My heart remains unchanged, except…

I could not bear a grey, empty-handed trudge back across the tarmac to the tram stop. So I bought a Christmas tree – a declassé plastic number, chemically engineered to engender neither showers of pine needles nor tears of joy and excitement. Its best feature was that it came in a long, oblong cardboard box with a handle down one of its long sides. It made me feel that I might be carrying something wildly more intriguing inside than an ugly IKEA Christmas tree. To begin with, it was a musical instrument (this reminded me of a dream I'd had the night before in which I was dining at The Ivy with my mum and Chris Martin), and I was on my way into town to play at the Royal Albert Hall, or the Royal Opera House, or in fact any of the city's exciting Royal venues. People would almost certainly be throwing flowers onto the stage, and I would receive visitors in my dressing room wearing a silk kimono and a turban. 

By the time I was back at East Croydon Station, I was carrying a lethal weapon, of which I was the sole trained operator, and with which I would single-handedly eradicate a cartel of Really Evil Badness. 

As we passed through Norwood Junction on the train, I was carrying a box containing a tiny Chinese gymnast who I was smuggling away from her inhumanly strict coaches.

I reside in a fantasy world of my own creating, clearly. An hour or so earlier, I had been scolded by the cashier in the IKEA cafe for dreamily dilly-dallying while he was waiting for my pin number, and the bickering couples in the queue behind were waiting to eat their meatballs. 'You're in IKEA now, you know,' he said, with the mildest suggestion of a threat and a faint echo of The Wizard Of Oz (the way you're directed around IKEA by an arrowed path always reminds me of the yellow brick road). 

In the unlikely event that any of my fellow passengers on the journey home had been speculating as to what was inside the cardboard box that actually contained a cheap plastic Christmas tree, the picture of a cheap plastic Christmas tree on the side may have given it away. 

But still, I'm saying that today of all days was a time to rejoice in the power of dreams. 

In which I question the motives of someone who gives me two free bars of chocolate on Halloween

Some days, it rains and you leave your gloves on the train. But others days, someone gives you some free chocolate. This morning, as I was leaving London Bridge Station, some out-of-work drama graduate pushed two Cadbury's Creme Egg Twisted bars into my frozen corned-beef-mottled hands. A Twisted bar – for the confectionary-shy – is essentially six small, conjoined Creme Eggs, mutated and moulded into a kind of Cadbury's Caramel formation. And I was given two! For free! Imagine! I don't have to! IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

But wait, I thought, as I shivered my way to the office. This is Halloween. A time for spooky omens, half-hearted celebration and macabre events. Could it be that my evil nemesis (I must surely have one, otherwise I would undoubtedly be living in an airy three-storey townhouse by the seaside, with a devoted husband, several photogenic children and limitless personal wealth by now) had poured their shadowy, shifting form into a branded fleece and pressed into my hand a novelty chocolate item laced with poison. Having hired men in overcoats and sunglasses to watch my behaviour for months through magic binoculars, they knew I would be drawn like a magpie to the glinting foil wrapper, and that within a few hours their malevolent cocktail of sloth, envy, insecurity and a glass and a half of full cream milk would be coursing through my delicate veins, and I would once again spend a profitless evening lying on my sofa murmuring 'the seaside... the children, must do something, have to achieve stuff... ooh! Top Model's on.'

But no. Back on the street, I chastised myself for being so pessimistic. Honestly, I'm such a Capricorn. I turned to the power of positive thought in an attempt to render my free chocolate a gesture motivated by goodness.

Eating any kind of Creme Egg product presents a challenge to one's inhibitions. Like the modern-day equivalent of the ladies of Cranford and their oranges, eating a Creme Egg generally requires you to desert any sense of decorum. Your options are equally suggestive. Do you penetrate the furthest reaches of the shell's interior with a probing tongue, or do you take a short series of hungry bites and risk a chin dripping with fondant? It's a dilemma that the coy may rather resolve in private. This morning, I decided to believe that kindly old Mr Cadbury had rained Twisted bars onto the commuters of south London in an attempt to provoke an orgy of sensuous and delighted chocolate consumption, knowing it would ripple (not a Ripple, that's different) outward until passengers felt their inner passions stirred to such a degree that they began embracing not their chocolate egg products, but each other. Commuters who had sat in rigid, tortured silence, desperate for a small measure of human contact, preferably with that anonymous but adored person they sat opposite every day, felt liberated  enough to draw a stranger into a spontaneous yet not unwelcome embrace.

If you watch the deleted scenes from Amelie, this actually happens.

Don't worry if it's not good enough for anyone else to hear…

I have joined a choir. This is obviously a good thing – physically, emotionally, socially, but most of all because I now have an official Hobby. A proper thing you actually Do, and can smugly write in the designated box on application forms, rather than apologetically resorting to vague concepts like cinema and music. I now belong in the ranks of people who do lindy-hop and go birdwatching. I'm also feeling quite passionate about one of these activities too. I'll let you guess which one.

I heard an amazing story of romantic derring-do at this week's rehearsal. Someone in our choir also sings in another choir – a small, exclusive a capella outfit who specialise in pop songs. This Sunday, one of that choir, or one of their friends (this detail escapes me) is going to propose to his girlfriend in Sainsbury's (I won't say which one, because she's probably reading and I'd hate to ruin the moment). But here comes the magic. As they're trundling up and down the aisles, the members of the choir will also be there incognito, in the guise of ordinary shoppers. At the designated moment, our hero will begin singing It Must Be Love (Madness, if you need reminding) to his girlfriend, and the choir will gradually join in, to the joy and amazement of bystanders. Oh yeah, and the girl. The performance will culminate, of course, with the proposal.

This is glorious for two reasons. Firstly, who knew that these foolhardy romantic gestures even happened in the real world? And secondly, it's a heartwarming throwback to the days of That's Life and their 'Get Britain Singing' campaign, which I would like to see revived. If you are too young to remember, one moment an old lady would be cruising the greengrocer aisle of her local supermarket, the next thing Doc Cox would be looming towards her in a white plastic pork-pie hat singing I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, perhaps weighing a ripe grapefruit in each hand like a pair of breasts, or engaging the startled pensioner in a clumsy waltz.

Singing and romance. What could be better? Obviously her saying yes would be better. I was discussing this with Mrs Jones earlier and she offered a sobering reminder of how my godfather had proposed very publicly once on an aeroplane, only to be turned down flat. But I am clinging to the threadbare ropes of optimism.

Good luck, Romeo.