Day 45: I Am Sure That I Am Back In London

"How can you be so sure?", I hear you mutter. Well, apart from being in my own home (which is, as far as I know, in London) with my stupid fat cat (who is now an alcoholic), and apart from the fact that there are big red buses and that going up and down the road, I have been given some very strong clues:

1. Anyone crossing a road makes a particular point of avoiding pedestrian crossings. Instead, they choose the busiest part of the street and wander across it as slowly as possible staring at the sky, eating crisps and making mobile telephone calls.

2. Dinner at an OK 'gastropub' (fuck OFF) last night in Vauxhall (for foreign readers: 80% scuzzy, 20% full of people who wished they lived in Notting Hill) consisting of a steak, some green beans, a glass of red wine and an espresso cost £26. You could buy the whole of France for that, let alone a 17-course gourmet extravaganza featuring deep fried foie gras and live snails with hats on doing the can-can. And that's without the tip.

3. The parking restrictions in my road come into effect between 10 and 12 every day. At 10.01, a Lambeth Council Corsa drew up outside my flat and spewed out FOUR parking wardens. This is where my council tax goes. Other things they could perhaps invest my £75 a month include:

- filling the potholes that cause people to fall over and lose their bumpers
- removing the crack dealers from the end of my road
- culling the hoardes of squirrels only now busting some moves in my front garden
- cleaning the streets and that
- stopping the atonal singing Chinese Christians from setting up their Hammond organ outside Brixton tube and filling the air with vile aural pollution
- putting some books in the library
- employing people to answer the phone at Lambeth Council
- putting in some double red lines just before the railway bridge in Brixton so that all traffic jams in Brixton are avoided forever.

4. My gym is half an hour's uphill walk away. But I drive to the gym, and then spend half an hour walking uphill on the treadmill.

5. A bottle of wine costs £300.

6. There are mad people roaming freely in the street. One of the mad people attacked a friend of mine in Great Portland Street last week and smashed her face in. She has just got out of hospital for the second time in as many weeks having had her broken nose re-set.

7. All of my friends are at work, and most of them are not happy about it.

8. There are people EVERYWHERE, and a lot of them look quite cross.

Sigh.