Paddington Barely Sane

I emerged into the light and bustle of Paddington station after a frantic, busy, and ultimately rather productive day.  My thigh vibrated...which was fun. I pulled out my phone. Three missed calls from d within a handful of heartbeats.

Oh God.

Three missed calls in a matter of minutes of course just means that the person who's trying to get hold of you has been serially unsuccessful. This makes perfect sense if you happen to have been a tube in the bowels of a city when they tried. Rationally of course, I know this. But when your dad's weeks are pretty much a series of hospital appointments, stitched together with plans and re-plans, timings and held breaths and hopes and new schemes and avoidance of too much thought, rationality tends to be out to a big long lunch, and while three missed calls in quick succession could mean anything, they rarely mean "hooray, this is gonna be a fun call!"

I called her straight back from, of all things, the rear end of a cookie stall.

"Hey baby, what's up?" I demanded urgently.

 "You've got my computer," she reminded me.

"I know," I said. I'd spent several hours on the train this morning calling it a parade of increasingly obscene names and showing it the view out of the window in a threatening growl.

"I need you to go up to Starbucks," she said. Gee...what a freakin' tragedy. "They've got Wi-fi there. And my recipe book is on the computer..."

"Your...your what?"

"My recipe book...y'know, the one I'm compiling."

"Oh, that recipe book...you want me to read you a recipe, from Paddington station?"

She chuckled.

"Noooo," she said. "That'd be silly."

"Well, yes," I agreed, relieved.

"I need you to email me Ranch Dressing...hence the Starbucks," she explained.

I went, I unpacked the computer, I sent her the recipe for Ranch Dressing, because sometimes, as The Guy, that's what you do. I packed up the computer again and was walking down the stairs when her text came through.

"Perfect," she said. "Now, could you send me Croutons?"

I turned around and headed back upstairs. The girl at Starbucks - the same girl, I noticed, who, several weeks before had watched me make a latte to my exactingly stupid standards, then turned leave it on the counter, returning minutes later to reclaim it - nodded at me, as if by now she expected that every time I left the establishment, I'd be back for some reason or other within a few minutes. I sent Croutons winging their electronic way through the ether and hurried down in time to catch my train...

Which was delayed. Hopelessly, mysteriously delayed. In recent weeks, it's at least made it out of Paddington before the crushing delays have set in, but tonight, it was cutting straight to the chase. I popped to Cranberry, a kind of fruit and nut stall that is becoming a new and dangerous habit of mine. I had a voucher for 15% off my order, so I figured some trail mix would serve as well as anything else as solid food. There was a young girl in charge of the till. She took the voucher, grabbed her calculator, and tried to work out 15%.

After a few minutes, she stopped.

"Can't do this."

"Oh," I said. "Why?"

"This isn't working," she said, gesturing to the calculator.

"Gimme a piece of paper and a pen and I'll work it out for you," I said. She did. I did. I showed her my maths. She looked blank.

"Need to use the calculator. Doesn't work," she said. I stopped myself from asking why, in that case, sahe'd humoured me with pen and paper.

"Let me see?" I said.

The calculator works perfectly well, and I did the sum again for her, showing her how the numbers matched up. Reluctantly, she tapped the number into the till. It shrieked at her.

She shrugged.

I sighed.

"Just gimme the coupon back and I'll pay and get out of here," I muttered. Life was getting to be too short for this. And so I left Paddington tonight, barely sane, what with one thing and another, but glad to have got a good Monday out of the way. Tuesday - I have a hunch - is not gonna be great: three days of assbuncles, bread, nuts and a big Indian meal is not really the way to go about capitalising on a loss. But this should be a much more dynamic few weeks coming up, time to re-do whatever's been undone during Deadline Week. Time and opportunity to knuckle down in some areas that need attention in my life. Everything starts again, re-energised tomorrow...oh, and I don't have to go back to London till July 4th, so hopefully, I might even stay a bit sane for them next few weeks!