Minor adventures in South London

It rained all today. This pleased my girlfriend immensely. She had been told that Britain was always raining, so the two days of clement weather in Wales had greatly disappointed her. We drove back from Oxford, where we'd spent the night, drinking in a bar called the Rusty Bike, which was full of posh dimwits. Or perhaps just young people. What's the difference?

It took longer than I thought to get back to Beckenham, and longer again to unpack the car and take a train up to London. We shambled up to Covent Garden to meet a friend for a cup of coffee, then shambled down to Charing Cross again, just catching a train back to Beckenham. Then, after a meal of fish and chips (or mushy peas and chips for me, as the fish is a food I have not sampled in many years) we went to Crystal Palace, where my old friend Barry Sheen regaled us with conspiracy theories.

It was strange that none of his conspiracy theories explained why he was named after a deceased motorcycle racer. Some mysteries will never be properly explored, I suppose. Nor was the fact that after we left the pub, two buses left the station almost simultaneously, leaving us to either wait for fifteen minutes or pay nine pounds for a taxi home. Nine pounds. This was ridiculous. I was annoyed, but impatient to get out of the cold, and drunk, and my girlfriend insisted on paying, so instead of spending fifteen minutes waiting in the cold and then innumerable extra minutes on a vibrating item of public transport, a man drove us home in a car air-freshened by what looked like a Czech Magic Tree. I wonder if there's some vitriol somewhere on the internet about the furriners coming over here with their air fresheners and stealing all the honest minicab drivers' jobs. That must be the dream of anyone in Prague, to spend rainy Tuesday nights ferrying occasional fares up and down a small hill in South London. Oh yes. There couldn't be anything better.

So now I turn toward my bed, ready to sleep, and still aggravated that it's taken me three months to discover the Wifi button on my Msi Wind laptop. And for the last five days I've been swearing at it for not giving me a connection to wireless broadband. Stupid buttons! I'll smash the damn thing with a hammer, then it will know who's boss. In an entirely non-anthromorphic way, of course. Computers hate it when you anthropomorphise them.