Yesterday's blog!

Heavens! This is actually yesterday's blog, which I wrote and then forgot to post! Reading this first will make a great deal more sense of the first paragraph of tonight's installment!! Call it a double bill!

The tree outside the kitchen window was full of great tits this morning. There's genuinely no way to write that sentence without it sounding ridiculously comic, but it was a lovely sight to see them hopping about. That particular tree is always one of the last to lose its leaves in the winter, so at this time of year it's filled with wildlife.

I went to the gym at lunchtime and then sat writing in a cafe in Kentish Town whilst Nathan knitted a cowl. One of Kentish Town's nutters was on the prowl. I remember her from the days I lived on Fortess Road. She's a deeply curious character. Older; maybe 60 or 70, and black, but always with enormous red cheeks which she paints on with lipstick. She's really posh, in a completely English way, which shouldn't seem strange, but, for a black woman of her age, particularly one who's plainly not exactly had the best life, it's all rather intriguing.

Back in the day, this particular woman used to walk into all the cafés in the area, order a plate of food, eat it, and then tell the cafe owners she wasn't prepared to pay because the standards of hygiene in the cafe weren't what she expected. She'd then flounce out, with the cafe owner spitting blood in her direction!

Her only problem with flouncing out of anywhere was that she could never open a door herself, one assumes because of possible germs on the door handle. So she'd hover by the door, asking in an incredibly loud voice for one of the other cafe customers to open the door for her. All rather comic.

Today she was on a tirade against internet porn. Her friend was looking at porn on his phone without any sense of irony or embarrassment. For some reason she felt the need to tell the entire cafe what he was doing, and yet he continued to do so. It was all rather surreal. Particularly when the woman asked if she could then make a phone call on the offending handset!

We went to buy some bits and bobs in the Sainsbury's Local on Kentish Town High Street, and it suddenly struck me that whenever I visit a Sainsbury's store, regardless of its size, I feel bitterly disappointed at its selection of vegetarian food. There's always meat and fish hanging from the rafters, but you'll be lucky to find a Linda McCartney sausage, let alone something like a vegetable pie or a nut roast!

When I last complained to Sainsbury's via twitter, some ghastly woman from Tufnell Park spotted my tweet and mocked me for having "First World problems," to which I responded, "if considerably more of the First World turned vegetarian, there would be considerably fewer THIRD world problems!"

Still, as we exited Sainsbury's clutching my tragic little box of veggie sausages, the Christmas tree in the window filled me with a little, rather tragic rush of joy.

I came home and worked, worked, worked, delivering the final bars of music to the Fleet Singers at 10.30pm, which means I can go up to Scotland with a clear head, and start properly planning the Brass and Oranges and Lemons recording sessions first thing Monday.