My little sister is having a baby, which is beautiful and amazing but really hits you where it hurts in terms of being an adult and getting your shit together, which I’m not at all and haven’t in the slightest.
Right now my idea of forward planning is buying two cans of gin and tonic because I know the train back to London takes three hours and not two. They’ve got three of us in one carriage arranged close enough that I know what the other guys are listening to but too far apart for meaningful human contact. I want to break from the pack but that sends a message and besides, I’ve got all this gin to drink.
I bought a Kindle recently, not because of any particular love of reading but because last week I paid £600 in excess baggage on a plane, most of which was books I’ll never read again. I don’t know about you, but there’s a feeling you get when you leave a suitcase containing £600 of crummy paperbacks in a lockup in Brent Cross, and it isn’t the distinctive feeling of a job well done.
I throw clothes away rather than wash them. There are stray dogs with more coherent life goals than mine. I’m fighting against adulthood like a bee in a strong breeze.
But it’s all cracking, really. Last summer london was all jungle music and poppers, now there’s contactless payments everywhere. Yesterday I had breakfast in a truckers’ cafe whilst watching the hairy bikers make osso buco on a widescreen TV.
Last week a guy killed an actual lion which means the human race is still totally at the top of the food chain, and the front-runner for the republican candidacy said about women, “in many cases, they truly are really talented”, which means that political satire is alive and well. It makes me wish lions had a heightened sense of situational awareness so they could sit back and watch the whole shitshow play out alongside us, their natural masters.
Trump is a man who always looks angry because he forgot where he left his shoes (“WHERE ARE THEY? THEY WERE RIGHT HERE”), and yet there’s a chance he might run the world.
And just yesterday my phone corrected “helpdesk” to “help swan” which was the cutest thing since Siri overheard me say “labia” and totally just showed me a picture of one.
Life is good.