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.

In Which I Am A Bitch, or The Luxury Chocolate Payback

You know who makes me sick?

Me.

I'm all, like, 'Say thank you to bus drivers!' and 'Let's all just get temporary jobs and watch the world as it goes past and take photos of lost mittens on the pavement!'

But as it turns out, I'm actually an angry, unreasonable commuter bitch, just like everyone else.

Still, I've been punished for it and I've been reading lots of improving articles in women's magazines in an attempt to move forward, spiritually speaking. As an unexpected bonus, I've also found a recipe for a surpringly versatile savoury tart, which is brilliant for picnics and lunchboxes.

But I'm starting at the end, and if you ask me, that's no way to begin a story, even if you're at the chapter in your creative writing course entitled 'Breaking the rules'.

It's 6.30pm. I'm emerging from the hot squeeze of the tube, subconsciously racing my fellow commuters to get as far away from the tunnels as possible. It's a Monday. The most psychologically gruelling of all the days, apart from Tuesday and most of the other ones. It had been a tough day at the fashion magazine sub-editing coalface. Maybe you don't believe that such days exist, but let me tell you, names like Ermanno Scervino don't spell themselves.

I'm hot. I'm tired. I've spent the last 20 minutes in a kind of battery farm of germs, sweat and freaky breath smells. At this point, Jesus does not want me, or anyone using the underground network, as a sunbeam. Among the extremely important and difficult things on my mind are: I must buy a birthday gift for a friend. I'm a gift-giving kind of a girl. But in this instance, I'm an embarrassingly late kind of gift-giving girl. On my way to the mainline, overland station, the portal to the suburbs and their purer strains of air, I walk past an upmarket chocolate concession. OK, I think. I will stop here. I will decompress by browsing their upmarket delicacies, I will buy the present and maybe they will have some samples for me to eat. The proximity of praline and caramel will soothe me and then, who knows, maybe even feed me on the journey home. (Buy a present for someone, buy one for yourself – everyone knows that's how it works.)

(Incidentally, in train-food news: this evening, the woman next to me on the train ate a Marks & Spencer prawn salad, four mallow/chocolate 'teacakes', two foil-wrapped all-over-chocolate digestives and two chocolate/caramel wafer bars between London Bridge and Forest Hill, which is the point at which I got off the train. What is the largest amount of food you have seen anyone eat on a 13-minute train journey, readers?)

I turn into the concession. Peace. Let the chocolate meditation begin. But before I have so much as a single sandal over the threshold (it's an open-wall kind of an establishment, so the notion of threshold is purely a theoretical one but it is the PRINCIPLE OF THE THING), an over-officious assistant bellows in my ear, 'CAN I HELP YOU?', a terrifying mask of make-up looming towards me like a clown who has been crying over the demise of the circus arts on a really hot day.

'No, thank you. I'm just looking.' And also, BACK OFF. I'VE HARDLY WALKED THROUGH THE DOOR (again, 'door' purely a linguistic construct in this instance). Don't you know I want to be furtive and sullen and isolated until the point when I actually need some help, and then I want to be righteously incensed at the lack of customer service available? Where do you think this is, America?

I walk to a different part of the concession. It doesn't take long. It's pretty small.

I browse in untroubled bliss for about one second, until a shadow falls across me, and a voice says, 'Can I..'

'I'M

JUST.

LOOKING.'

I say this in a manner which I must, with an accuracy that pains me, describe as really bloody rude.

My second assailant whispers an apology and scurries away. I turn around to see that it is a meek, paunchy bespectacled man who looks about 14 rungs below Timothy Lumsden from Sorry! on the ladder of downtrodden. I feel terrible – so ashamed of my behaviour, in fact, that I leave the shop immediately. There is no reason why I should feel more remorse about Timothy Lumsden than I do about Melted Clown Face. Perhaps it was the startled-faun style of his retreat. Perhaps it is an unsettling matter of gender politics. Whatever. In a characteristic act of stereotyping, I imagined him in a back room somewhere, weeping over the staff basin while bingeing uncontrollably on an unfit-for-sale box of damaged violet creams.

So the next day, I resolve to go back and be unflinchingly pleasant and cheery. I would win him round with the Miss Jones who makes jokes with the binmen and says bless you when people sneeze. Yes, you're right, she is kind of annoying, but she gets on much better with shop assistants. I would buy the present. Maybe Timothy Lumsden is on commission, in which case I'll buy even more of his luxury chocolates and eat the extra myself, in an act of selfless reparation. Although, let's be honest, he probably won't even remember me. A fast and wide river of people runs past his shop every day. What's a single one to him?

I think he remembered me.

I return to the shop. He is there. No sign of Clown Face. My browsing is fresh and concerted. The shadow falls. Here he comes. Be nice, Jones. Be. Nice

'Can I help you at all?' he says.

'Oh no thanks. I'm just having a look at the moment,' I say, beaming. 'Thanks very much, though.'

'Oh, just having a look?' he says, with his sitcom nerviness. 'OK then. You're just having a look.' And off he goes.

Phew. I think it went OK.

But then, I hear his voice behind me as he approaches another browser. 'Would you like to try some chocolates?'

That is a remarkably direct way to get my attention. I turn around. Strip lighting bounces of a silver platter he's carrying, which is loaded up with FREE CHOCOLATE TO OFFER PEOPLE LOOKING AROUND THE SHOP.

I am looking around the shop. Offer me a chocolate. Go on. Offer me a chocolate.

Naturally, I can't say this. I am proud, and also on shaky terms vis-a-vis demanding free stuff from a man I was incredibly rude to the previous evening. I turn my back and aim hard for nonchalance.

'Would you like to try some chocolate?' he says to another drifter. They take some.

Offer me a chocolate, Lumsden. I am the only other person here. Seriously, offer me a bastard chocolate.

He does not.

I make my selection from the shelves. I think to myself that he's probably left the tray of chocolates out on the counter for people to help themselves. That's what they do in the Bromley branch. I'll get my free chocolate when I pay.

As I stand at the till brandishing my credit card, the silver tray is nowhere to be seen.

Like I said, I think he remembered me.

I hope he told Clown Face the next day and she put an extra sugar in his tea as a treat.

That reminds me of this:

The Man With The Yellow Trousers

*WARNING* Contains shallow class-based generalisations

On Thursday morning, the man sitting opposite me on the train was wearing a magnificent pair of yellow corduroy trousers.

In this photo, the colour is not displayed in all its true and dazzling vibrancy on account of the glare through the window. But believe. Daffodils. Buttercups. Colman's mustard. Cartoon bananas. Yellow peppers. Yellow crocuses. Other things that are way yellow. That is the kind of yellow we are talking about. He had the yellowness turned up to yellowven. I'm sorry. I haven't done this for two weeks. Forgive me.

Being acutely aware of my recent period of non-posting, I thought I may have found the perfect way to break my drought. I would become for one day only – or possibly more if it went, like, really really well – a street style blogger (like this or this). Here is a genre that's really hit a peak since I began this blog three years ago, and there's nothing I like more than being slightly late to a party. As I travelled through the city that day, I thought to myself – all the way from Dulwich to Islington and back again – my trusty yet furtively operated iphone camera would capture the fashion flashpoints of all those idiosyncratic tastemakers that make London the coolest city in the world. Apart from Tokyo. And probably New York. And I should point out that I've never actually been to Split, so for all I know they could really be pushing the asymmetrically cut style envelope over there.

Two basic problems here.

Firstly, I kept getting distracted and failing to notice what people were wearing. Secondly, when I did remember, I didn't really see anyone else wearing anything so worthy of a double take. Really, people do mostly wear bland shoes and black and denim clothes. Although I did like these ladies with matching hair, who I saw while I was waiting for my lunch dates at Angel station.

So then I was left with a photo of a man in yellow trousers and a desperate need for a new blogpost.

So I kept thinking about the yellow trousers – and the man inside them. He had a certain air of well-to-do about him. Distinguished, I might say. You may be able to discern this yourself from the sturdy brown shoes visible in the photo. To me, they say, 'I'm just going to take a relaxed yet purposeful stride around my vast country estate', as well as, 'Then I will put on a striped shirt and a blazer and enjoy an evening of light orchestral music in the expensive seats of the Royal Festival Hall.' He is also carrying a classy-looking leather binder (just seen, as we say in the world of fashion-photo captioning), which may contain information on his portfolio of stocks and shares, or perhaps just a copy of The Beano or a cut-out crossword puzzle from the Telegraph.

It occurred to me that apart from the young, skinny and hip, the only other men I had seen wearing below-the-waist colours of this intensity were... well... a bit posh. I know this is a gross generalisation. You were warned. But a former neighbour of mine was a good example of this correlation. He was a lovely man, plummy but poorer than you'd expect, primarily as a result of spending his working life trying to make things better for people less fortunate than himself which, as it turns out, doesn't pay quite as well as one might think it should. I provide this information so you will understand how he was my neighbour, and thus living in a one-bedroomed Victorian terraced flat conversion in southeast London, and not, say, a glass penthouse in Chelsea Harbour. Anyway. I would often hear the front door slam and look out of the window to see him striding in the direction of the bus stop wearing a pair of pink or scarlet jeans, as bright as a tulip.

What is the connection between the posh and their lurid pants? I welcome your theories. I have three of them:

1) I wonder if it is related to the innate, achieve-anything confidence that often seems to come with what someone in a BBC costume drama might call 'good breeding'. "Who says that just because I am not technically young, skinny and hip, I can't wear these trousers? It is my BIRTHRIGHT! And now I will climb The Matterhorn! And then do some motivational speaking. And then I will buy a 6-BEDROOMED house in FULHAM."

2) The reason posh people have money is because they are deeply, and secretly, thrifty. They only buy clothes that are heavily reduced in the sales, which means they only wear clothes rejected by the majority of shoppers who – as I have established during my street-style blogging research – plump for black, brown and denim. Not yellow, green and hot pink.

3) It is some tiny act of rebellion against the charcoal and tweed, traditions and tedium, of their social strata. 'I may have lived a childhood of rules and repression at boarding school, and still feel the need to ask permission every time I go to the toilet, but LOOK AT MY TROUSERS. I'M SO ALIVE!'

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.

These Moments Shape Your Life, Is What I'm Saying

I'd like to address this post to the primary school teacher I saw at London Bridge station at about 9.45am a couple of days ago, who was attempting to wrangle her class into an orderly crocodile of prearranged pairs.

Hello, 'Miss'. Congratulations on your 'teacher' voice. Wow. Piercing is just one of the words I could use to describe it. This is just a personal opinion of course, but I don't think you should shout at your group of pupils, loud enough so that the whole platform can hear, if not the majority of south-east London: 'OH YES, REBECCA IS THE ODD ONE OUT, ISN'T SHE?! SHE'S MISS WHEATLEY'S PARTNER.'

I just feel like you could mess someone up that way.

(To Rebecca: you won't always have to be partners with Miss Wheatley. Although, realistically, it is a possibility. I wouldn't want to lead you on in that respect.)

If This Is God, I Might Just Have A Bit… or So This Is How It Starts

I was on a bus recently, at the tail end of the morning rush hour, when an older woman – smart, 60-odd – moved towards the doors to get off.

As she did so, she said in a quiet and casual manner – almost as if she was checking whether this was the right stop for Sainsbury's – 'Jesus loves you all. Whatever you're going through, He loves you and will take your burden off you.' Then she got off, and the doors closed behind her, and the bus moved on.

Nothing new there. Declarations of love on public transport? Many of us have been there. Particularly, I would venture, the females – although it's true to say that these affirmations are less often the honeyed murmurings of a beloved, and more the highly flammable exhalations of a florid-cheeked, dribbled-chinned madman who has chosen you – lucky, lucky you – as his bus date for the duration of your shared journey. Or, not necessarily worse, some dead-eyed, slack-trousered murderer in waiting.

Similarly, many of us have experienced unbidden invitations from strangers to welcome the Lord into our hearts. I, let me tell you, no longer answer my doorbell. Partly because I don't live on the ground floor and I'm quite lazy. But principally because the number of times the caller turns out to be two well-meaning ladies with religious leaflets and a comfy shoe swiftly lodged between door and frame, as opposed to a postmen handing me a parcel I have ordered, is a ratio in which the Lord very much has the upper hand.

But there was something about this particular cocktail of god and good wishes that I found oddly warming. A spiritual mulled wine, if you are a mixologist who also enjoys a laborious analogy/metaphor/whatever.

I think it might have been because the woman on the bus was playing it kind of cool. I liked her 'oh and by the way' approach to spreading the Word. It's no big deal or anything, but I'm just letting you know. Ooh, before I go, I should probably should mention... She was nonchalance carrying a shopping bag. At no point did she thrust a pamphlet against the panes of my glasses or pin me to my seat with the hot, pungent breath of zealotry. She just slipped out of the double doors without a backwards glance, leaving me strangely disarmed.

If you have faith – and I'm not sure if I do – you expect it to find you, to come for you, in your times of high crisis. Those are the occasions when you wait for that thing you believe in to assume the kind of three-dimensional identity that would allow it to push a giant lever in the direction of 'Things are going to be OK'. Some arms, I guess, would be useful in that three-dimensional identity, whatever it is. Or really strong, supple legs.

But in those times of terrible, fathomless darkness, your friends also come for you, and your family. Chances are they're not quite up to performing miracles (and honestly, who is? bad things happen all the time and no one stops them). Still, there they are with their tea and their company and their desperately wanting to make you feel better. But understandably, they don't always come for you on the 185 bus on a Tuesday morning, somewhere around the Denmark Hill area. They're busy people. We all are.

On the bus is where I do some of my best thinking. But it's also where I do some of my worst. Glum, unflinchingly pessimistic state-of-the-Jones-nation thoughts. The rhythmic roll and stop of a journey through the traffic lights of the city often lulls me into exactly this kind of meditation. There is comfort in routine, of course – in bus rides and supermarket shops and the like – but there is also drudgery and relentlessness and you, on your own, trying to get on with things.

And then Ms Public Transport Preacher came along with her guerilla goodwill and made me feel ever so slightly better.

I didn't really think this was the start of Something between me and the Lord. Some salesmanship from a stranger and my pre-existing obsession with Christmas carols does not constitute a conversion. I wasn't seriously expecting Him to relieve me of my burdens. Realistically, He was unlikely to step in and cease the escalating hostilities that were erupting between me and the Penge branch of Homebase at that time, or tell me how to fix the broken lock on my gas meter cupboard which I had learnt was my own responsibility and not that of British Gas, even if you offer to pay them to fix it and ask really nicely.

But like I said, she – and by extension He – made me feel ever so slightly better. And feeling ever so slightly better is no small deal.

Then and now, in three parts

One: Just before Christmas, I went to a garden centre with my mum, near where she lives. We went under the pretence of buying a few last-minute Christmas presents. We really went so we could have a cream tea in their cafe. But then we actually did end up buying some last-minute Christmas presents. Oh, we felt like two of life's winners that day, let me tell you.

At the cash register, I found myself transfixed by this display of sweets, which represented the forbidden fruit of my childhood.


I say fruit. What I mean is boiled sugar with a small amount of 'fruit' flavouring.

As a young family, we took many long car drives to grandparents' homes and far-flung holiday locations (Yorkshire! Northumberland!). To me, these tins of sweets were the most precious jewels in the rack of prohibitively expensive trinkets placed near the till at each branch of Little Chef that we stopped at. To my parents, these tins of sweets were substantially more expensive than a bag of Opal Fruits. What was wrong with Opal Fruits, after all? Nothing. Except maybe the name. Oh yeah, and they didn't come IN A TIN that you could keep afterwards and put special things in, like insects and bits of birds' eggs that you might have found in a wood. And they didn't come with DUSTY WHITE POWDER ALL OVER THEM. So exotic. So rarely allowed. So much whining and unsuccessful emotional blackmail on my part in their pursuit…

But when I saw them more recently, I realised I could afford to buy all the fancy sweets in tins that I damn well like. Well, maybe not that, but certainly enough to make myself gratifyingly sick. Or for my neighbours to break into my flat and find me totally wired on sugar and listening to a hissy cassette of Captain Beaky & His Band (our soundtrack to long northbound car journeys) on repeat at an ear-haemorrhaging volume, with dusty powder all over my face, hair and clothing, trying to force next-door's cat into a small empty tin.

And then I didn't want them any more.

Two: People often talk about reverting to the behaviour of their youth when they return to stay at their parents'. I'm not sure if this is true, but maybe that's because my mum has moved from my former childhood home, so I no longer have the opportunity to hole up in my teenage pit poring over the sleevenotes to what-I-would-like-to-say-was-The-Smiths-but-was-in-all-honesty-more-likely-to-be-Wet-Wet-Wet, while yellowing posters from Look-In bear down on me from the walls. But even if I still had my adolescent Batcave, I'd like to think my powers of conversation are slightly better developed, as well as my interest in being in a room with more people than just myself. But then I would say that.

Still, I sometimes wonder if this relapse into sighing-and-solitary-confinement comes about through other people's projection. At the Christmas dinner table, while we were trying to divide ourselves into two equal quiz teams, we thought we'd shared the children out perfectly with a young niece on each team . Until Young Miss Jones The Younger, my junior niece, said, 'But what about Auntie Hannah? She's a child.'

I am 37 next week.

Young Miss Jones The Younger has many excellent qualities, but she has apparently yet to grasp the empowering nature of adult singledom.

Three: Ms R and I just missed a train home from Beckenham Junction last Sunday because we took time to check the departures board, instead of throwing ourselves blindly onto the waiting train in the station. It is amazing how often one is undone by caution. So we took shelter in the waiting room to pass the half-hour until the next train. After a little while, a man came in, early 60s, outdoorsy, wipe-clean rucksack and woolly hat. He sat down, took out a box of Continental chocolates, removed the lid and held them towards us.

'Would you like a chocolate?' he said.

Erm, no thanks, we mumbled.

'They're Belgian,' he said, with a heartbreaking hint of desperation. 'I can't eat them all. It seems a shame to waste them.'

When I a child, I would have been incredibly firm about my rejection in this scenario. Strangers! No! Strangers with chocolates! No, no! Tell your mum. Tell your dad. Tell a teacher.

But now, older and sadder, I very nearly said yes. Not through greed. Although a bit. But through sympathy. Oh god. Save me, please save me, from an old age of offering strangers chocolates. Save me from thinking it's OK, and save me from knowing it's not OK but being unable to stop myself.

Still. The fact is, I'm a little bit selfish and I don't like sharing. This, I'm going to make very sure, is never going to change.

Et tu, tights?

I like Christmas as much as the next person which, I suspect, is not quite as much as we're all meant to.

But despite my residual, unshiftable affection for the season, I'm not sorry to be free of the ordeal that is the month of December.

I like to think of it as some kind of physical, emotional and psychological decathlon - a multi-disciplined event that will push competitors to the farthest reaches of human endurance, contested annually between the dates of December 1st and 25th. The prize, if you are not one of the fallen, is the continued possession of your health, mental faculties and a token amount of money in your bank account, and the licence to eat like a 30-stoner for the next few days over what I like to refer to as 'Christmas proper'.

Those 10 terrible, testing disciplines:

1) Going to work five days of the week, just like the rest of the year. The toll of this on the human mind and body is not to be under-estimated.
2) The endless wild socialising.
3) The constant pressure to be seen to be achieving discipline 2) and not cancel anything because you are feeling 'a bit under the weather' or 'you want to strike for home now before the weather gets any worse'.
4) The endless game of cat-and-mouse you must play with various seasonal illnesses that are at large. You will be coughed, sneezed and exhaled on by brazenly ill colleagues, commuters and shop assistants until your immune system is a quaking, cowering shadow of its former self.
5) Survival on a diet of your choice of alcoholic beverages (however, this must include mulled wine and port), crisps, mince pies and Celebrations.
6) The annual 'surprise discipline', which this year is an out-of-season favourite – the assault course that comprises many inches of snow, which public transport will reliably fail to overcome.

I don't know what disciplines 7 to 10 are but let me tell you this: they are also bloody hard work.

If you are attempting to negotiate this Herculean set of circumstances, your nerves will be stretched to breaking point. The tiniest triviality can tip the balance, and cause everything to come crashing down – like the game on Crackerjack where they had to stand on a plinth and hold more and more brilliant prizes but also some cabbages too – transforming you into a wailing, thrashing, pedestrian-pushing, public-transporting-shouting sociopath.

What will be the straw that breaks the manger's back? What will be the excessive clumsy metaphor that causes your readers to go, 'Christ, she has really overcooked this'?

For me, in December, it was this harmless-looking pair of woolly grey tights.


I say harmless, but they do look like they were made to be worn by a 10-year-old child being evacuated from London in the Blitz, which is admittedly not exactly a risk-free scenario.

Some background on the monstrous tights:

They came from a fashion sale at work. The fashion sale, if you are unfamiliar with the interior workings of women's magazine publishing, is the less common sibling of the beauty sale, an in-office dignity-free display of savagery where women who purport to be cool taste-makers will commit random acts of violence against each other for the right to be the first to rummage through a cardboard box full of leaking shampoo samples and buy them for a fraction of their real price. A fashion sale is the textile equivalent: the leftovers from fashion shoots that haven't been returned to the labels who sent them in. Which is to say: shoes that are too big (standard sample size: 7), clothes that are too small, but often – in some shallow reworking of Goldilocks – tights that are just right. (Models have long legs, so they mostly wear larger sizes. As do I.)

Tights that are just right, then. At least, that's what I thought when I pulled them free of an almighty spaghetti-junction of their siblings at the sale, and fell in love with their academic-grey, homespun-by-industrial-machinery cosiness. It's important to stress that they didn't look in any way small. No smaller than my other woolly tights. I checked this using scientific instrumentation in the days that followed my hosiery-related breakdown.


This was very much on my mind when I put them on at 8am on one of those today-is-going-to-be-incredibly-hard-work December snow days. Not a Snow Day. Oh no. Just a snow day, when you have to embrace your regular journey to work as though the sun was shining and the streets were clear. Let me tell you that there are few things better than putting on a new pair of socks, but putting on a new pair of tights is one of them. They gave me inner strength to face the journey ahead.

They gave me inner strength for about 50 metres. At this point, on my walk to the station, it occurred to me that the waistband of my beloved new tights was beginning to lose contact with my waist. Fifty more yards and it was clearly thinking of making an introduction to the tops of my thighs. At this point, I attempted my first hitch-up. It was not entirely successful.

I carried on along the quiet side streets to the station, where I could perform the occasion upward knitwear lunge with no witnesses. These attempted quick-fixes were unsatisfactory – what with the layers of winter coat and dress it was hard to gain a purchase. This meant that as I approached the station, my walking speed was accelerating as I tried to outpace my tights on their descent down my legs, hoping I would make it onto the platform and into the carriage before they became visible beneath the hem of my dress. I had also tried to affect a kind of legs-squeezed-together walk, in the hope that I would impede the tights' downward progress further. To a stranger, this, naturally, made me look as though I should have been to the toilet before I left the house, but didn't, and was beginning to regret it.

This was not the soothing start to the day I had in mind when I got dressed. Now I was flustered. I was disappointed. Yes, December was dragging me down. Still, I had made it onto the train. I was on my way to work, the train was not late, no social plans had been cancelled and I was illness-free (and bizarrely, I still am, although I keenly await the stomach bug which seems to occur around my birthday in mid-January. This may simply be a nauseous physical reaction to the fact that I am a year older and still do not like olives, an unable to swim and have yet to achieve numerous other, more crucial, life stages). I was safely sitting down in a chewing-gum-free seat. No one, thus far, had seen my gusset as it landed on my shoes. No further harm could be done to my mental state for the time being.

Fourteen minutes later, the train arrived at London Bridge. I waited till everyone else had left the carriage before standing up and performing a thorough act of hosiery redistribution, starting at the ankles, gathering upwards, gathering, gathering all the time, under the skirt and upwards, collecting the excess material in a bunch in my hand, then stretching it back up, high over the waist, leaving me in perfect comfort, perfectly covered. A maneouvre that was of particular fascination to one of the London Bridge platform staff who was watching me through the carriage window.

I left the train good as new. But by the time I had reached the ticket barrier, this fresh start was in vain. A new climbdown was upon me. A quick hitch in the anonymous crowds of the station, and I carried on my way. But down and down the tights went. I was now, officially, quite annoyed. And it became clear that the bad thing that was happening was now happening more quickly than ever. Outside, the streets of zone 1 were busy. It was less easy to adjust my undergarments unnoticed, but I had no choice. I had tried to assimilate the now-constant hitching process into some kind of hip-hop walk. A disaster, obviously, but I had little choice. I was also attempting to walk as quickly as possible in search of cover, and was impeded by dawdlers, standing-still smokers and tourists, and the treacherous winter conditions under foot. I was furious. Desperation made me increasing less subtle. I was now publicly digging and lunging at my thigh and waist area like a woman in the throes of a major hygiene issue. Or at the least, a irritable itchy skin condition. YES, IRRITABLE. TELL ME ABOUT IT.

The hitching gave way to simply holding up my tights as I walked. I'm not sure what I looked like by this point. Possibly a deranged woman desperately trying to hold her tights up, on the edge of a Falling Down-style psychotic episode.

By the time I reached the branch of Marks & Spencer on Southwark Street, a journey of approximately seven minutes only, I felt capable of acts of violence on an epic scale. It was here that I bought a new pair of tights – boring black nylon, not lovely woolly grey, but I gripped them in in my hand like an oxygen mask in an emergency as I staggered the final few yards to safety of the office toilets where I could get changed.

This is why the decathlon is only 10 events, and not 11 - the eleventh discipline, which was outlawed by the IAAF for being too demanding, involved speed-walking to the workplace down a busy street while attempting to subtly keep up what have been officially ratified as the worst pair of tights in the world. I would like to see Thompson and Hingsen going to toe to toe on that one.

Snacks, not small talk

If you know anything about me – and I have no idea if you do – you know I love a snack. I love talking about a snack. I love eating a snack. What, where, when, how often, home-made, shop-bought… all snack facts are good snack facts, Jones-wise.

That's why I loved this man, enjoying a train snack on the 5.58pm last week, specifically some nuts (I'd say honey roasted, if you pushed me) in a plastic cup.


But where do you get an open cup of nuts? When you're shopping to satisfy your nut needs, no one asks you if you'd like them open or wrapped. There are plastic bags for this kind of thing anyway. Tubs with lids. Not cups from a water cooler, which this clearly was. We were pulling out of London Bridge station, where he could have pick-and-mixed those nuts from The Vaults, the sort-of-food-market they have there (if, under the canopy of food, you include flowers, greetings cards and Thomas Pink shirts). But I know he didn't.

I felt sure this was a case of buffet cut-and-run.

I know the signs because I am a buffet poacher myself. I don't believe a hotel continental breakfast is all it claims to be unless you can squirrel away enough items in your pocket to constitute a hearty lunch later in the day. It's not just buffets, though. I'm an any-time opportunist. I say this as someone who sat down to watch the Old Vic pantomime a couple of years ago with the bulkier elements of a Pizza Express Nostrana salad wrapped in a napkin on my lap, having run out of time to eat it in the restaurant beforehand.

I imagined The Nut Guy standing around in his office half an hour earlier, smiling wearily through one of those promotion/birthday/big-result-for-the-firm celebrations, all salty snacks and sparkling wine, where colleagues pride themselves on steering the conversation away from shop talk, when it would be so much more comfortable for everyone if they left it there. The saga of the sales manager's loft conversion was not the engaging narrative he imagined.

At precisely the moment when the second hand nudged 5.30 (he'd been watching the clocks carefully – it was also 12.30 in New York and 08.30 in Tokyo), Nut Guy switched off his small-talk smile, gave out a one-word goodbye and made a break for the lifts. Then he paused, turned on his heel, walked back towards the party, wrenched a fresh plastic cup free of its family and filled it to the brim with snacks, before leaving for good. Maybe he stuffed a sausage roll into one blazer pocket, a miniature scotch egg in the other.

At 5.30, he became the rightful owner of a whole weekend's leisure time and a seat on the 5.58 train. But he was also entitled to his share of that buffet. And who says you can't have it all? Not Nut Guy.

He got off the train before me. Here are his leftovers...

I can't say I wasn't tempted.

Niche posting

You should only read on if you were a follower of sci-fi-inspired game shows in the early to mid-80s.

Still with me? Oh, one or two of you. Good.

Here we go.

It's nice to know that Uncle from The Adventure Game is still alive and well. While reduced to travelling by underground these days, admittedly.

Gronda, gronda, etc.

Biscuits + battery packets = ?

What could have caused this spectacular chocolate-digestive-and-Energizer-battery-packet fall-out on a train into London Bridge one recent Sunday?

Perhaps an elderly passenger changing the batteries on his hearing aid was so startled by experiencing the world in full surround sound again that an unexpected tannoy announcement or shrill ringtone sent him jolting into the woman next to him, who was fortifying her two young children for a day of educational yet fun activities on London's South Bank with an open packet of chocolate digestives whose contents were sent tumbling southwards by the impact.

Perhaps a fashionista on their fashionable way to Dalston, Shoreditch or similar, has found that weighing down the pockets of one's jumpsuit with batteries is the perfect way to ensure it hangs correctly. This same fashionista likes to lick chocolate biscuits, then 'accidentally' drop them on the grimy floor of the train to ensure she is not tempted to eat them.

Perhaps…

Customer service

It is Saturday evening. I am in Marks & Spencer at Victoria station. I am weary. It has been a wearying week. I am buying approximately £7.50 worth of slightly overpriced but reassuringly high-quality groceries. The cashier scans the contents of my basket.

'That'll be £500 please,' he says, delighted with himself.

'Wow,' I say. 'That is so reasonable.'

We have a little bit of a laugh together, and I pay the £7.50 and get on the 185 bus home.

It is Sunday morning. I am at the Bagel Factory concession in Paddington station. I am weary. It has been a wearying week. I am buying approximately £2 worth of barely toasted bagel and honey. The cashier punches some buttons on the till with his rubbery-gloved fingers.

'That'll be £150 please,' he says, delighted with himself.

'Wow,' I say. 'Is that all?'

We have a little bit of a laugh together, and I pay the £2 and get on a train to Oxford, imagining the memo that went out to all service employees of mainline train stations.

'Your customers are busy working professionals. They may be tired, worried, or just really really hungry. Brighten their day. Create a rapport. Try a joke. Share a moment together. People will come back for more.'

But are staff at Paddington stealing jokes from staff at Victoria? Is there a bitter dispute about whether Caffe Nero at Kings Cross or Monsoon at Waterloo have bagged the exclusive rights to use 'My assistant manager's got no nose...' Will the staff at WH Smith at Euston be taking it in turns to wear a false nose and glasses?

This may only be the start of it.

Interference

I was on the bus home on Thursday night when I noticed something about the man in front of me. The top of his head was bleeding. Not pouring – he would probably have realised if channels of blood were trickling down his neck and as it was he seemed oblivious. Instead, caught in a wispy cloud of hair that was no longer doing a very good job of warming his head, suspended above a bald patch the size of a saucer, were several bright red drops which still had some way to go in their leisurely congealing process. It looked unlikely that he had come any kind of a cropper during his evening out. It seemed more like he had been absent-mindedly scratching away at some old abrasion with slightly too much power and was completely unaware of the consequences which were now making me feel a little bit sick.

I felt very strongly that I should probably think about doing something.

I wasn't sure what.

If you see someone in physical distress, I do believe your natural human inclination is to try to help them, even though by the time you've wrestled with indecision, and had a quick grapple with your inhibitions, they may well have made a full recovery and wandered off.

The first option seemed to be to tap him on the shoulder and say, 'Erm, excuse me. Do you know your head's bleeding? Because it, like, is.' Then I was worried that this might embarrass him, and he would touch his scalp gingerly and realise there was blood on his hand and then not know what to do with it, and I would offer him a tissue from my bag and he would feel awkward and uncomfortable at being mothered by someone roughly 30 years his junior.

The next potential path was simply to lunge at him with the same tissue and start dabbing away uninvited which, at best, may have caused him some considerable surprise, and at worst could have seen him standing up and shouting abuse at me, batting my ministrations away with wildly flailing arms while the bus driver called the police.

The final option was to get out of my seat, go and stand in his eyeline, cough obtrusively and attempt to spell out his plight with an elaborate sequence of head jerking, eyebrow raising and eye rolling, and the high risk of marking myself out as a bus lunatic.

I did none of these. I lifted up the four-day-old Sunday supplement I was reading so it was right in front of my face, and I could no longer see him. Before I got off at my stop, I had lowered my magazine several times to make sure I hadn't imagined it, and the blood was still there. Each time it was.