Conspiracy

I sat in the cafe today behind a couple of young men who were spouting nothing but conspiracy theories. Jimmy Savile. David Cameron. Donald Trump. Aliens. They covered everything with theory after theory. I got exhausted simply listening to them. Imagine putting that much effort into being paranoid?! I can't really be doing with all that footle. If the world is run by lizards or people who "know shit that we don't," there's nothing I personally can do about it, so until I'm prevented from doing something I want to do by these invisible sources, I reckon I'm content to live in blissful ignorance. I certainly don't want the ground I stand on to seem any more unstable than it already does. I'm far happier trying to fight the evil that I CAN see.

I have a cold. There it is! The cough from last night mutated, and now I feel the need to quarantine myself from Nathan because I generously passed the last cold I had onto him and it was considerably more horrible for him than it had been for me.

The other person I delivered my last cold to was Abbie, so it was highly ironic that I'd been booked to do a quiz with her this evening!

The quiz was up the A1 in Barnet, and it was meant to take just forty minutes to get there, but apparently my satnav had different plans, and we ended up on the M25 in something of a panic, wondering why we were traveling in ever-decreasing circles.

We got there eventually, though, and the quiz went well. I largely felt like crap, and we were fed coriander, but Abbie was utterly brilliant and asked some really interesting questions. Did you know, for example, that the world record for female discus is actually a longer distance than the male record? The discuses women use are apparently lighter, but I'm still staggered by that particular statistic.

When we emerged from the quiz venue, the entire car park was covered in a thick layer of frost which glistened under the street lights. I had to run the engine for quite some time before starting my journey, just to clear the windscreen of ice.

We arrived back in Highgate at about 11.30 and I walked Abbie down to the tube to make sure trains hadn't stopped running and she wasn't going to be left in the lurch. I took the escalator exit back onto Archway Road, and as I emerged onto the pavement, two young women were passing, one of whom was plainly in the middle of a rant. What I heard was "fuck you" before they both looked at me, looked horrified, giggled and simultaneously said, "not you!"