Turning on a knife edge

People were actually wearing cagoules as I walked down to the tube yesterday morning. Who wears cagoules these days? I even had to google how to spell the word! I was instantly taken back to childhood trips to teddy bear picnics. The slightly muggy air. The sense that it shouldn't be raining. The firm English belief that the rain would clear and leave us with a very jolly sunny day. Cagoules can be ripped off and shoved in a bag and the rainy morning can be forgotten. All very British.

Rain water came in through our roof last night. It was highly annoying in light of the fact that someone came around to fix our broken guttering just a few months ago. It adds to the somewhat bohemian garret vibe of our flat, I guess. But is it cool to be a boho at the age of 42?

On my way into work yesterday I got obscenely irritated by a young girl with one of those husky, damaged voices, who was pouring herself all over her boyfriend whilst, every twenty seconds or so, making an incredibly loud, desperately/irritating, sea lion-like honk of laughter, plainly to show what a wonderful time she was having sucking on her fella's ear. She couldn't have been drunk at 9am, but was behaving in a way you might expect someone to behave on a night bus at two in the morning. It was the sort of laughter which could easily have turned to tears at any moment. One moment she's all lovey-dovey, the next, she's turned on a knife-edge and is telling him he's a bastard. There was something deeply troubling about the scene in my eyes, because the woman seemed to actively want to paint herself as a sort of silly, pathetic, needy, weak creature. Feminism and decorum be damned. "I've bagged this man and the world needs to know about it."

Speaking of turning on a knife edge. I sat next to a bloke on the tube who was texting someone obsessively. Message after message was being fired off. He dropped the c bomb in the first message I saw him typing, and the messages seemed to get worse from that point onwards. He was on a rant: "Don't lie to me you filthy ho." "Don't f**k guys in cars at your sister's wedding." On and on the pithy little poisoned arrows went. One after the next. He seemed fairly impassive about what he was doing. I looked at his face, expecting to see the eyes of a maniac, but he seemed quite calm. People are strange aren't they?

We had a very busy day on Em today. A morning of music calls followed by recalls to decide who plays what. To me it's always interesting to see how much prep actors put into auditions. Some were brilliantly on the ball. Others felt like they hadn't taken the task as seriously. The big wide world isn't as forgiving as we perhaps were!