Smelling of Burnt

It rained all day on Saturday. Big heavy wet rain. We finally tackled the visit to the launderette to purge the winter quilt of Minnie pee. It was a fairly grim experience, not helped by the dark fucking relentless weather. To avoid eyeballing any of the pissed-off people using the decrepit washing machines, I tried staring out onto the Bethnal Green Road. The shop opposite is “Trotter’s Jewellers – Buyers of Gold and Silver”, which if their sign is to be believed is “Number 1 in the UK for Bling! Bling!” Depressed by the view, I turned my gaze back towards the humming, rattling, whirring machines. Our tumble dryer was overheating. I noted the warning next to the coin slot, “Remove clothes from dryer as soon as it stops. This keeps wrinkles from setting in and reduces the possibility of spontaneous combustion”.

We got home soaked to the skin and with the quilt now just smelling of Burnt.

Monday again. According to Shelley von Strunkel, this week’s eclipse will throw everything into chaos. Great. I’ve been sacked by my doctor. After 15 happy years, the boundaries have changed and I am no longer in the Tower Medical Centre’s catchment area. No one wants new patients, with the NHS on the verge of collapse and all that, and the surgery I have been sent to has a kind of gloomy eastern European feel to it. The sallow reception staff are beleaguered to the point of having hiccups. They’ll take me on for now, if I complete a questionnaire and wee in a jar, but I may need to find a new practice soon. I’ll try not to get attached to the new GP. My last one was an absolute diamond. I'll miss him.

I exit the new health centre cheerlessly and walk slowly to work, feeling that familiar start-of-the-week numbness. The Whitechapel market is frantic and there are hordes of people weaving all over the place. I pass by old graffiti – “I love you whitever your name is” and new graffiti – “Bitch Magnet”; past the Lahore restaurant where the balti is so spicy that it once made Dirty Birty cry; past an albino girl in big orange glasses resembling a Spielberg alien; down the streets behind the hospital where recorded announcements boom out from futuristic devices attached to lamp posts urging visitors, in a male voice from the 1950s, not to leave valuables on display in their cars; past carpets of pigeon droppings; past the cheerful yellow and blue Ludlow Thompson Beetles; past several discarded five-gallon cans of vegetable oil; past hundreds of thousands of office workers having a nervous crafty fag outside their buildings; past “The Codfather” Fish & Chip shop; past the feckless edgy eye-contact youths on the steps of the Look Ahead rehab hostel; past the posh nursery in the old gothic church; past the smokers outside my office, past Keith, the laughably ineffectual security guard, into the lift up to my floor. I say hello to everyone, sit down at my computer and log on. Almost instantly I stumble across another hilarious example of how the world is going completely stark raving mad.