easier for girls

Though I spent half about twenty minutes this morning kneeling on a patch of gravel trying to get a usable picture of a few pale orange arthropodic things (which looked like they might have been mites) scuttling around the corpse of a bumblebee there's something much more immediately satisfying about these, even though in between taking pictures of the bee and getting this I'd wandered into Ayr to take back a tentatively mail-ordered pair of replacement trainers which sort of fitted but which felt incredibly poorly-made and didn't seem to have a sole wide enough to support to the maximum width of foot the foot-area could accommodate. They reminded me a bit of a thing I used to do when we visited my maternal grandmother, sleeping in beds furnished with about five layers of sheet and blanket which were thoroughly tucked in on three sides; a sufficiently light child could edge off the side of the mattress and hang, suspended by the sheets and blankets - fine for immobilely sleeping but really overbalancey-feeling in footwear, even just standing around in them for five minutes and walking up and down the length of Nicky's parents' kitchen. Ayr's limited shop-array provided no suitable alternative not already seen in Edinburgh, though as always when walking around Ayr on a busyish shopping-day I'm very glad I live where I live.

Over the winter my grey hoodie started to age quite badly, so it was partially replaced with the same model in a sort of dull maroonish colour. Most of the time this wasn't a problem but I would occasionally find myself in a portion of town whose pavements were beset by drunk association football performance spectators, potentially some of those who have either appropriated the innocent maroon for their own ends or those who consider themselves the mortal enemies of those who wear maroon. Inebriate cockbags are probably not particularly likely to register protestations of not being the slightest bit interested in association football performances so I tend to either avoid particular ends of town on days when I notice a performance being performed or quickly exit if I only notice when the streets fill with drunken bellows. I was luckily wearing grey and black on the way back from the town centre when some red-and-blue-striped people started wandering past wearing scarves, shouting red-facedly at each other and (in the cases of an unfortunate pair at the back) lying in the middle of the road for comic effect so that cars had to stop. They shouted something which sounded like "nice shorts" at me as I went past, having crossed to the other side of the street. As if lying down in the road were not amusing enough, the same pair then decided to amend the positions of some of the cones blocking one side of the road at some temporary traffic lights to further restrict the remaining space and then making pretend kicking and punching movements at the car at the head of the queue whilst the lights were at red. As I walked further along the way they'd come it appeared they'd also been twatting about with a tap and hose in someone's front garden and pushed a couple of bins over, so I really hoped that the police car which steamed along and headed off in their direction was for them.