Dim, some television

Having slept most of yesterday on the boat ... I slept right through last night and woke up, groggy and confused this morning, eventually bumbling out for dim sum after midday.

I didn't feel like Chinese food so I called up a German friend and asked her to pick me up a burger on the way over to the restaurant. Sadly, instead of displaying the Teutonic punctuality of her forebears, she was only getting out of bed at well past noon. Back in the old days, Germans would have been up with the lark and invading the Low Countries before breakfast, but now apparently they're all slugabeds. Which was jolly inconvenient for me, because having made my order of a burger, I had to then sit at the table as a succession of different food rotated past me on the lazy susan, all of it denied to me.

Well, there wasn't actually that much I could have eaten, as it was all either steamed buns full of meat, or dumplings full of meat, or meat full of meat, or a solitary dish of deep fried cubes of tofu that I wasn't going to eat because I don't feel you should base your diet on the consolation prize for coming last in the meat-eating race. Mine is a proud route to take, and a hungry one too.

My burger arrived almost an hour late. I wish it had been brought to me by a comfortable member of the medieval working class (a burgher bringing a burger, no less) but it was just a German. I considered chastising her for her tardiness, but you can never be sure how that will turn out, so I kept schtum.

Having now been awake for at least three hours, I figured it was time to go back to bed. So I left and went for a cup of coffee, but was so confused by my decaffeinated life that instead of going to a cafe, I walked back across Victoria Park to our flat, blithely ignoring the football match I was wandering through.
At home, I read the remaining 270 pages of Oscar and Lucinda that I'd started on the junk yesterday. It felt at times as if Peter Carey had been paid by the word to grind it out, and grinding it was: I got to the partially satisfying end in a bad mood, a bad mood unimproved by latterly watching a succession of Stewart Lee shows and then missing the motorcycling because I had been too busy reading about mobile phones.

It's not all glamour though: the last thing we did today was to move a television from a friend's flat to our place, getting some exercise and another 5 inches on the diagonal, while they get a television shaped gap on their mantelpiece. Strangely, within five minutes of setting up the new television, the size seems quite normal, which suggests it was a bally waste of time to move the thing. Ain't technology great?