unsteady

I managed to ensure a guarantee of early-departure today after starting early to examine a small problem and left at the intended 15:30 despite the reduction of the early start's gained time (not that I'm anywhere near needing to build up any extra time) by the lunchtime play, pie and pint at the Traverse. I've found that the best way to ensure timely departure is to arrange something so I had taken the precaution of buying a ticket fo in the city of Sylvia which I missed at the filmfest last year and which was handily placed at 15:45. Ace film, depicting a city as a city should be: scenic, peaceful and largely dialogue-free.

There was a wobbly-looking woman standing beside a bus stop on my way home at whom I looked a little more intently than usual to see if her light-catching head warranted a sneaky capture after walking past. However, straight after I passed she fell forward onto her face, luckily merely hitting the pavement; a few inches taller and it might have been the corner of the kerbstone. Her eyes were open and she was breathing but she seemed quite out of it and unresponsive to stimuli and questions concerning sensations in her left arm. The other bloke kneeling by her head didn't have a phone so it was I who had a fun chat to the London-accented girl at the ambulance despatch centre (which I thought would be reasonably local, if not actually at the ambulance station within the city) who didn't know where Lauriston Place was (and similarly didn't know what was meant by "outside the old Royal Infirmary's A&E entrance") and didn't know the standard phonetic alphabet when she asked for Lauriston Place to be spelled or spelt out. She also didn't seem to be listening to the updates to the woman's status (gradually upgraded from lying-face-down to standing-up-but-woozy to getting-ready-to-walk-off, insisting she needed no ambulance) and kept asking if we'd stuck her in the recovery position or propped her against a wall. I thought she'd been waiting for a bus so would have got a couple of girls waiting at the bus stop to mind her until a bus came but the woman turned out to be heading off in my direction so I watched her from a discreet distance for a few blocks instead.