8/04/2005 08:53:00 PM|||James O'Malley|||

I've had a reasonably busy four days since I last posted. My family are now back from their holiday in France- they returned a relatively tidy house. By which I mean, Heather came round briefly and insisted on tidying up for me, much to my distress. I thought it'd be weird if my family thought I'd unloaded the dishwasher, and moved any of my (non-literal) crap into an organised pile. But oh well, at least Heather (aka: a woman) knows her place.

The major theme lately seems to be buses- after a drought of ten years, I've caught rather a few lately. Since the trauma of first trying to catch a bus, to the trauma of bomb-scares, I've taken quite a few buses. I'm getting quite good at it now- ignoring my fellow passengers, only saying what is neccessary to the bus driver, and the whole ticket purchasing mechanics of using the machine, and the quiet squeal of "thanks", looking away from the driver whilst disembarking.

It'd be vaguely relaxing listening to loud punk music, whilst not seat-belted in, going down the A6 if it wasn't for one particular annoyance.

One thing that consistently annoys me about buses is the lack of leg room. Now, this is nothing to do with my being overweight, or me being incredibly tall. In fact, I think I'm probably shorter than average these days... but bus seats are clearly not designed for human beings. They are TINY. They seem to try to be trying to pack as many people into these buses as possible- not that any of the buses I've been on have ever been full. The only place I'm slightly comfortable on a bus is either in the front seats, where slightly more leg room is given, due to the lack of seats, or right at the back, where, for some reason they also give you more room.

I mean, seriously, what sort of midgets did they design these buses on? Were they bought cheaply, second hand from the Lord of the Rings set, where they got in all the hobbit extras every day?! It's things like this that keep me awake at night.

Speaking of transport, I went to visit Heather today- on the bus, of course. It was the particularly unfriendly bus driver today. After offering me a glass of water, to which I refused, Heather suggested we go on a walk. Now, I was expecting a gentle stroll through her village, through the urban areas- full of houses, commerce and pavements. It was quite a bizarre walk, for many reasons.

First of all, it was like stepping back into the 1950s. The village is a mobile phone blackspot anyway, with a signal only being possible if you're 3m off of the ground, so the phones were dead, and scarily, in the post office (cleverly combined with a news agents), the tillmonkey knew all of the customer's names. Dare I say he looked at me a bit funny as I was an outsider? There was a community spirit, of sorts.

Bought another scratchcard. Lost.

Heather then took me through a park, full of horrible children enjoying themselves, and then down a small, overgrown footpath. This lead into a field. The field lead into the middle of no where. If she was planning to kill me and hide my corpse, perhaps to steal my brick of an MP3 player, now was the best possible time to do it.

As luck had it, she didn't kill me- and the closest I came to death was either from several tractors approaching me, or dehydration from such a lengthly walk... by my standards. After we reached what I assume must have been the next village, there was... a lengthly walk back. I probably should have predicted this. This time we took to the road, and I literally mean road. There wasn't a pavement, which made walking into traffic slightly unnerving, especially when there, in theory, could be people like me on the road.

We finally made it back to her house. After checking an OS map using a bit of string, it turns out that we'd walked a staggering 5.8km (that's 3.6 miles). It was the furthest I've walked in ages, and I'm horrendously unfit. It was slightly embarassing.

This said, I got my revenge on Heather when we played table tennis on her very impressive home-made table tennis table. She was rubbish. There was me bouncing the ball about on the bat, alternating sides, letting it hit the floor and catching it, and turning it into a perfect serve, in one swift movement, and there was her, trying desperately to presumably push away the air in front of her bat.

All in all, it's been a lovely few days, presumably made more lovely by myself being a feature in other peoples lives.

|||112319118510490349|||Buses, Walking, Tiring