Spit and Polish

It was Marathon weekend in London yesterday. Unlike in previous years where they went along a road about 3 mins walk from my flat, this time I could kneel on the bed and watch them go down the road outside. For example, this is the woman who eventually won it. She's running faster than I can sprint and this is mile 16.

Impressive.

I heard someone on television saying they are going to leave a lot of the barriers and things in place for the royal wedding. Not that I'm expecting them to drive past my flat. And in any case I shall be further into town waving a small flag and wearing some union jack pants. On my head. But I will actually be there because I'm very happy about the royal wedding and like that kind of thing. I remember having a street party when I was 4 years old when Charles and Diana got married. Happy days. For me at least - not so much for them in retrospect. So having an affection for the royals I was rather freaked out to see this postcard in amongst my latest Artbox order.

That's just freaky. Of course Artbox is my go to supplier for completely unnecessary stationary, including stickers. And what do I need stickers for? (for a flexible definition of the word 'need')

I'm nowhere near finished. The button ones I was particularly pleased with. They're Artbox too of course.

If you've made it this far through this post you deserve a little treat, so let me introduce you to Chapter 1 of "Lixie's Adventures with Gentlemen". The therapist says to gently push my comfort limits to get used to being sociable again and talking to strangers without freaking out and so on. So on Marathon day I'd been in doing the occasional clap out of the window and listening to the church opposite dolling it's bell continuously. It occurred to me after a while that the bell must be electric as it was bonging once every 15 seconds. That is just long enough for you to start thinking it might have stopped when it bongs again. After about 2 hours of bonging I felt I was going insaner and decided to go for a little walk. I went to the Thames path (about 1 min away and in the opposite direction to the bongalong) and having always turned left in the past decided to push my boundaries and turn right.

Naturally it was a dead end.

But, there was a blond guy sitting on a bench in the sun reading a James Patterson book. He was wearing sandals which did almost put me off but I girded my loins and sidled up to him. He looked up and smiled and closed his book which I thought was fairly encouraging so I uttered my awesome chat up line "Would you rather carry on reading your book or would you like to have a conversation?". I tell you, the boys at work are really impressed with that one. When I first saw him I was honestly not thinking "Aha, likely victim." But as we got chatting we seemed to have a few things in common and made each other laugh and time passed quickly. He was polish and also spoke german and russian (something very sexy about russian) and was an engineer. We talked about all sorts but it wasn't until the first hour had zipped past that I mentioned wrestling. And it was about that time that he mentioned his wife and child. I'm not saying there was a correlation, but I will be mentioning wrestling sooner in future just to save time. We chatted for another hour and he wanted me to go to the cinema with him since his wife and child were away visiting family and so he was on his own all weekend, but that just seemed very wrong (I can imagine how I would have felt in the past had I been away and my other half had gone to the cinema with a girl he'd just met that afternoon) so I declined. We'd been sitting on the bench the whole time but he stood up as I got up to leave and it turned out he was about 2 inches shorter than me. Not that it really matters but still....

So what did I learn from Chapter 1? First off that I can talk to a strange man - or at least a man who is a stranger and then may or may not turn out to be strange. Second that I can be proactive and go out and meet people. Third, that I should mention wrestling sooner. All in all, it was a valuable experience.