let up

A couple of little breaks in the rain today. No many though. Various popular rain-overload-indicator sites such as The Big Drippy Leak Beneath Conference Square and The Bread Street River were all nice and active for most of the day.

Sadly as well as making people buy umbrellas and need the toilet it seems the all-pervading presence of liquid drives people to drinking; I passed a couple of women at work in the afternoon discussing how much they'd had to drink at lunchtime. Upon visiting the cinéma at half-past eight in the evening I found myself sitting next to someone who had apparently been drinking since half-past three (and frankly smelt and sounded like someone who had been drinking for five hours). I was then refused entry to a pub on the grounds of my legwear (yay! finally...) by a doorman who seemed a little worse for drink although the alternate pub turned out to be almost pleasant. Finally I was taking a couple of pictures in a quiet street behind the flat on the way home when I was interrupted by a pissed-up oaf carrying a carry-out who proceeded to go for a piss between a couple of bins next to the one I was resting the tripod on. I moved away to another bin only to be followed when the bloke had finished. Insofar as I could make out what he was saying he appeared to be asking "whut ye deein with the camera?" (taking a picture of that lamp-post and tree), "are ye wuth the polis ken wuth the camera?" (wtf? No. Do I look like a policeman or something?) and "If yer no the polis why doan't ye fuck oaf ya stupit bastart?". By this time I had replaced my camera in its bag and was walking swiftly away. He shouted a little more then seemed to begin to give chase. Whilst it might have been retrospectively amusing to speculate upon what a fifty-plus drunken alcoholic podge-merchant would attempt to do upon catching up with me at the time (given my past experience with drunken schemies) my adrenal gland and I thought it wise to leg it round the corner, go on a little high-speed decoy detour in case he was somehow keeping up with me then silently and watchfully return home.

I'm glad that I still manage to somehow offend the sensibilities of old jakeys despite having short hair although it is worrying to think that he's only one of many people making the world a slightly mankier place through the power of drink.

Almost forgot. If you've been wondering where all the Cockburn Street emoes go when they're not in Cockburn Street then they're in the second alley east from North Bridge between the High Street and Market Street. Millions of the buggers. If they're still there tonight they might even do for the Collections assignment.