Devouring Books

I had to go up to Edinburgh yesterday for an interview which meant a train journey. I like trains, the problem though is that I regularly end up sitting with an insane person. Insane people travel by train a lot.

This particular chap got on the station after me which meant I had to stand up and let him in. I should have known he was an oddity from the look he gave me - a look which said "You are sitting next to me. I don't like anyone sitting next to me. It means my imaginary friend will have to stand, and that makes him ANGRY." Anyway he reluctantly sat down, and I sat back down and picked up my newspaper to read more about something that wasn't Kate's pregnancy and the chap got out a book. All well and good. He was a reader which is a good thing. And it would have been had he grasped what is supposed to happen when you read - that is to say, you lift the book into your line of vision, hold it there, and read the text from left to right, thereby absorbing the meaning of the words. For him however, reading was a multi-sensory experience. He was indeed holding the book in his line of vision (and bearing in mind I was reading my newspaper here) the problem was he periodically lifted it to his mouth and breathed into it deeply - deeply like empty your lungs deeply. This went on for a while (time tends to stop when you read about George Osborne's taxation plans) and realisation dawned only slowly that I was sat next to a nutter.

While still facing frontwards, I slid my eyes to the left to watch what was going on next to me - was is a breath? If so, was it inwards or outwards? Or was it a kiss? And if it was a kiss - was it with or without tongues? Because if he had his tongue out, I was going to have to move. (If it was without tongues, I figured I could stay put.) I couldn't see that much without turning my head which I did ever so slightly - I was pretty sure it wasn't a kiss. Sensing my interest he moved slightly to block my line of vision, and quickly I switched my eyes back to my paper. Out of a darkening sky, sleet hit the train, slapping against the windows and giving me the excuse to casually glance his way. The book's pages appeared loose like it was poorly bound, its font was tiny and every now and then it had an ink-drawn diagram - I saw two: an ornate cross and something like the cross-section of a conker. Every now and then he sighed as if life was too much or the book was telling him something he didn't want to hear. I decided it had to be something vaguely spiritual, or cultish, although in no religion I know of, do you have to breathe on the text. By the time we pulled into Edinburgh Waverley, I was almost wall-eyed from trying to see exactly what it was he was reading. I failed. As I walked along the platform, I wondered - was he trying to suck the meaning through his mouth, but then he was breathing outwards and not inwards. Was he trying to animate the text with his breath of life? If I hadn't been there would he have ripped out the pages, salted and eaten them? And if he had offered, it would only have been polite to eat one too.

Travels with my Aunt

What is it about sex? Yesterday wasn't a day when I was going to get sex right. Ever have days like that? However hard you try - you just end up getting the sex thing wrong?

So I linked up with Penguin's digital guru Sarah-Elizabeth to talk through social media stuff, and before we started work I suggested we grab a sandwich. Sarah works in publishing which obliges her to wear black and be in her twenties with wavy dark hair and long legs. I have only met her briefly once before in a meeting so we chat a while. It turns out she hasn't lived in London all that long and has come down from a previous job in Glasgow. She says she is still going up to Glasgow at weekends, and it is about then I turn into her hopeless aged auntie. I hear myself asking her if she is going back to Glasgow to see a boyfriend and she looks at me a little strangely but says no it is just much of her life is still there. Since she is from the North-East I ask her where she went to school and if she went to university, and I just about stop myself asking her if she is eating properly and has she made any nice friends. What can I say? I am 48 and she is young enough to be my daughter. Anyway we finish eating lunch and I am pretty sure Sarah is relieved when we move back into the office to start work. She whizzes between pages and iconic brushes and html until our work is done and I'm suitably grateful. Later, I check out the About Me page on her blog which start with the statement she is a lesbian - moreover a lesbian who "tries to put the world to rights when it comes to LGBT issues". So that is a big old Oops from Aunty right there. I read it and I bang my head on the desk three times straight after.

And my day carried straight on. I climb on the train back North and haul out the iPad for a couple of hours of TV.

Since i missed the Danish thriller The Bridge when it was shown, I downloaded it for just such an eventuality as a long train journey without the children. I had only watched one episode about a month ago. Admittedly there had been a grim moment when a body turned out to be a top half of one woman and the bottom half of the other which must have made getting dressed that morning really hard, but all in all it had been OK.Twenty minutes in last night, a lanky moustachioed man goes into a bathroom and takes a tub of moisturiser from a shelf. The problem being he was naked. Actually that wasn't the problem. The problem was the fully-clothed guy sitting next to me on the train. I try and pause it but it won't pause. I scrabble at the iPad like a dog at the back door. The man next to me thinks I watch porn. I turn it off and sit looking at the blank screen. The chap next to me has his own laptop open and starts a game of what I am guessing is Civilisation. He is not happy when he has to stop building his empire to let the pervert out to the buffet. I don't really want the buffet. I want to fast-forward the scene so I can keep watching the episode. I decide the best place to do this is the loo. So I take the ipad into the loo. Too late I realise that this probably looks worse. This probably looks as if I have taken the ipad into the privacy of the loo to rerun my favorite porno bits and reach my destination just that little bit earlier than scheduled. I return to my seat and a further nine minutes into the episode the detective glances down a corridor to see a fat naked man in an armchair. I turn off the iPad again. The guy playing Civilisation either moves seat or gets off the train, and I watch for a little while longer till 40 minutes in when the female detective slides her hand down her pants and smiles. I give up and get my book out.

Just one of those days

I have had one of those days where you go with the flow or you go under. After a weekend with my achy-breaky mother and father, ("Mummy, you have been away 100 days," my 4-year-old told me when I got back,) I hared off to London for meetings about work. The builders started today but that was OK, my husband could take care of them. First warning that all would not be well was the fact that I discovered on the train, my mobile was dead; I decided that was alright because I did not have to ring anyone. Not until the train shuddered to a grinding halt and it emerged that someone had stolen the overhead lines on the track. Who would do that? What do you do with second-hand train lines? Start your own train company? Do you sidle up to a likely lad in your local boozer and go “Psst. Wanna buy a lot of electric cable - I mean, a lot? Like train track lot. Got a train track, have you?”

I get to my first meeting an hour late. It is an important meeting. I have not met the person before. I am already at something of a disadvantage because I am late. I am at even more of a disadvantage when I realise I have been waiting in her glass-walled office, examining the books on the shelves as you do, my back to the wide open plan seating area outside, with my skirt firmly tucked into my knickers. You are not telling me nobody saw that. You are not telling me people weren't emailing each other about the mad woman with her skirt in her knickers and deciding whether anyone was going to tell her or let her leave that way. You thought that just happened in sit coms didn’t you? Well, it happens in real life too. It happened to me. How I laughed.

Because I was running so late for the next meeting, I then missed my train home. That should have been it. But no. When I got into a cab to go round to a friend's house, I didn’t realise that I was actually speaking Yiddish or Portugese or a mixture of the two. Naturally enough, the cab-driver took me not to De Beauvoir road where I wanted to go but to Bouverie Road which is obviously how you say it in Portugese and several miles from where I wanted to be. Then, and really it would have been better if I had given up the ghost at this point, I rang my husband. The builders have discovered rotten roof joists in the arches we are converting. They may all have to be replaced(the joists rather than the builders). The builders had been on the job an hour before they made their discovery. One hour.

Making whoopee

When I returned to work after my six-year-old was born, I automatically became one of those mothers who are convinced they would be infinitely happier at home. These mothers think that quitting work would rub away the years on their face and boost both the IQ and life-chances of teenie-tinies who do not yet know how to cut up their own food.

My work-station consolation was a silver-framed, happy days photograph of the children and the thought of a patient and loving nanny at home who cared for my children with greater efficiency and better humour than I ever did. We saw our former nanny during the weekend in London and, about the moment she gave the children whoopee cushions, I went off her. Whoopee cushions - there is a good toy for the train especially when your husband insists you sit in the quiet coach because the other carriages are so busy.

The "quiet coach" has signs which dictate the terms of the peace: no mobile phone calls; electronic equipment to be used in silent mode and "chatting" (a past-time the railway company obviously does not approve of) to be done "quietly and with consideration for others." As my husband pointed out, the signs said nothing about whoopee cushions.

We took up our seats, blew up the cushions and the party began. "Daddy, daddy, listen." The whoopee cushions did their job. A gift, as they say, which just kept giving. It gave so loudly and with such ferocity that one of them popped and the boys were forced instead to decorate their baby sister with googly bloodshot eyeballs, drooping in brass loops from black plastic spectacles. Another gift from the ex-nanny who does not have to live with that picture in her head.

I heard the slightest "tut" as a fellow passenger in court shoes and a neat business suit marched by our mobile joke shop on her way to the buffet. She met my eye and glared. I looked at the boys realising with sharp horror that she was not just tutting at the grotesquery of the babe and the tomfoolery of my sons. How do you explain to a stranger who despises you that your children have not just spent 55 minutes burping their little bottoms off? Which is worse: "I'm so sorry my children are inveterate bottom burpers," or "I'm so sorry, I let my children play with whoopee cushions in the quiet coach. Shoot me now but put a silencer on the gun first."