451: Time and puke

Time has conspired against me to create mild confusion at the bus stop one morning. I'll explain. First my alarm went off, on my phone, as usual, waking me up and sending me into getting ready for work auto-pilot. After whatever it is that gets me from my bed to the bus stop, I looked at my watch expecting to see a time in the region of a quarter to eight. What I actually saw was around about a quarter to nine... was I an hour late for work? I doffed to the authority of my phone for the time. It said the time was a quarter to eight, phew, but it also told me the day was Wednesday. It wasn't; this all happened yesterday on Tuesday. I check my watch repeatedly throughout the day and know for a fact the time was correct on Monday. Today – Wednesday – my watch has suffered total battery failure, so it's time to get the little kit and spare batteries out of the tool box. Oh, the endless minutiae of everyday drama.

I bought a pile of cheap watch batteries off eBay. They were very very cheap. And I bought a special key for twisting open the back of my watch. The life in the batteries is approximately one year, which isn't long for a watch. But the price was good. It once cost me about ten quid to get a watch battery changed in a kiosk in the Trafford Centre, and it is about the same at Ernest Jones, so I said to my self, I said, riddle me that, I'm never doing that again. What did I say Derek? You said fuck me, you're never doing that again. I never said that Derek, well I never. So now I change my own watch batteries. True story. Tedious, but true. And apparently things that are funny are true, and/or vice versa. So that's good.

A mind – my mind – is not built to cope with such levels of mystery and confusion at that time of the morning. It leaves me convinced that those around me are actors in a prank against me; Jeremy Beadle or The Truman Show come to wreck vengeful havoc on my petty little carboniferous bod. Then, after getting off the bus in Manchester city centre, and walking the one minute to work down one of the busiest streets in the whole entire world (probably, or not), I noticed that there are three piles of dried up vomit running down walls and across the floor. These are in three separate locations: one on the front window of Dawson's musical instrument shop, one just on the side of some faceless building, and one right next to a Natwest cash machine. Each of these has been there for about a week and shows no sign of being washed away. What happened to the I heart Manchester clean-up mentality? It's disgusting... they wouldn't allow this in Japan. They clean up the puke over there.