Weight a minute Conan

Better late than never.
I have just watched ‘Roger and Val’ with Fred Molina and Dawn French. I think it is wonderfully funny, poignant, well written, tastefully acted and a must see. I even bothered to watch it on BBC iPlayer.
I am warming to ‘Grandma’s House’. Simon Anstells piece. The programme is easing into itself.
So now my Mondays are completely ruined with two lots of ‘Corrie’, ‘University Challenge’, ‘Grandma’s House’ and BBC iPLayer.
I cannot believe I have just told you my viewing habits, but it’s 23.15 and I was meant to be writing.

The theory was I was going to bed early so I could get up at 5.00 tomorrow morning and write for three hours. But somehow the evening has run away with me, Fred and Dawn.
After the show I walked to Piccadilly and waited for a 19 bus. The heavens opened – my mother’s phrase – so I stood under the roof of Waterstones book shop. As the 19 rounded the corner four of us ran to get on the bus before we got sodden. I barged in front of a man and his son. I looked down and realised that the son, far from being a boy child, was a very little Japanese woman. I apologised for queue jumping but she sneered at me and went upstairs. From behind she looked like a twelve year old lad, from the front she looked like a middle aged woman who was sick and tired of being wrestled at the bus stop by people mistaking her for a scruffy schoolboy.
I walked slowly back to the flat the sky divided between charcoal grey rain clouds and a shy blue. By the time I reached my block the rain started to spit.
This weekend we celebrated two birthdays. Annie, my friend and Jim, my husband. We call them the twins. He is three years older than her but they are both 29 degrees Leo with Gemini moons. Of course I don’t have a clue what I’m actually talking about only that they both irritate me in exactly the same way. Annie is the female version of Jim and he vice versa. I love them to bits but give them a tape measure and rational thinking and I’m dead meat.
I rustled up an Ayurvedic meal with spices, mung beans and slimy ochre. I have got a recipe book to teach me about wind, mucus and bile, but it was in the flat and I was cooking in the country. B went to see an Ayuvedic doctor in the hope that he can get her better quicker. Once we’ve mastered the art of kapha, pitta and vata all will be well.
She is doing brilliantly. But a six hour back operation is not going to heal over night however much I – or she – would like it to.
This morning Jimbo drove me to Tunbrdige Wells Station. They’ve gone all high tec and ticket barriers. I got nicked on Friday night by Mr. Jobsworth who did not have to fine me but chose to. He pointed his finger at me for not buying a ticket on the train The guard didn’t materialise and I was too knackered from my first week back at LBC to argue with the officious, sneering one. Had I been my normal pugilistic self I would have given him a tongue lashing and told him to shove his ticket machine where the sun don’t shine, in the event I shoved a twenty pound note in his grubby little mitt and flounced off like Miss Piggy.
This morning I paid full fare – it was too early for my OAP Freedom Card – and I took my seat with a workaday bunch of commuters and a group of Girl Guides who got off at Waterloo East. The chief guide had a flower in her hair and a little hobbit sticking out of her rucksack, and that is why my daughter never stuck with the Brownies….
I slept for about ten minutes having boned up on the Golden Age of Air Stewardesses for an interview this afternoon and disembarked into the full force of a freezing August in London. I had to buy a cardigan from JIGSAW to warm me up. Then I went to the juice shop at the entrance of Charing Cross Sytation. I had apple, cucumber, echinacia, spinach and something else which was meant to make my brain wake up. By the time I had slurped my last slurp through my pink straw, and walked to Leicester Square I was so wired I could have absailed up to the third flloor using one finger and a paper clip.
The first thing I did on arriving back at the flat was order a set of weights from ‘Argos’. I then drove to Wandsworth, Southside, parked the little red car, and frogmarched into ‘Argos’, told them my reservation number and went to till B. The cashier told me to go and get a Waitrose trolley as the box of weights weighed over 25 kilos. It hadn’t occurred to me that I had to be a weight lifter to carry the bloody things. The cashier called a boy who heaved the box into my trolley, she handed me the metal bar, wished me luck and waved me goodbye as I wheeled off my booty.
I shopped for a few bits, in the biscuit aisle a humming woman – she was singing not smelling – asked my what I had in my trolley, I mimed being a heavy weight lifter. She smiled and picking up a pack of Garibaldis moved onto the seeds and nuts. I had pre-meditated my unpacking routine. Got to my car, couldn’t get the trolley through the parking spaces so had to walk round the car-park before I could get close enough to my motor. I then balanced the metal rod in the front, opened the boot and using my thighs, core strength and a breathing technique I’ve seen on body building programmes managed to hoick the box of weights into the boot of the car. The whole chassis sighed. Drove back to the flat and into the underground car park. I had visualised the next manoeuvre, by weaving the metal rod into the plastic tape on the cardboard box carrying the weights I would be able to drag it to the lift. It worked. Coaxing the box like a weighward Rottveiller I talked it up two floors, along the corridor, over the doorstep and into the hall which is where the ruddy thing is still sitting. Nina, my personal trainer, did phone to apologise for not thinking about the weight of the weights. I now have to wait for her to turn up on September the 2nd before I can unpack them, there is no way I can assemble the damn things on my own, and anyway I have put my back out transporting them from Wandsworth to Battersea…
So as the clock strikes twelve the ‘oosbind’s another year older, he enjoyed his birthday by walking the daughter down the hill and back. She is writing a song, her first proper paid commission, whilst Annie has gone off on her sisters yacht to catch the rays in Greece. I have a new cardigan and a state-of-the-art set of dumbells – Arnold Shwartzenegger eat your heart out. Conan here I come…..