Nice work, Sherlock.

London’s Earl’s Court is a rabbit warren of very narrow streets packed with towering, multi-level, Georgian terraced houses, long since divided into flats or hotels. I lived in one such edifice. One morning, as I left the building for work, my entire visual field was filled with a gleaming wall of white metal. A huge, 52 seat tourist coach was parked outside the hotel opposite. It was like seeing an ocean liner berthed in some tiny canal. I looked up to see the rows of tourists, who, judging by their sagging expressions, had been sitting there for quite a while, waiting for the stragglers to board.
I was kitted out for autumn London traffic; black helmet, full black leathers, steel-plated motorbike boots, long hair, unshaven, sun glasses, earrings, the full-on, urban Mad Max nightmare. Was I a motorcycle courier or a patch wearer? Nope, I was a desk-bound advertising copywriter. With a head full of deadlines, and, I hoped, a more than equal amount of appropriate ideas, I hooked my helmet over the handlebar of my big, shiny new motorbike and nodded my head forward to grab my hair to ponytail it, but I saw something, which stopped me dead. Oil was pooling on the road around my gleaming front wheel.
Now, I’m no motorbike mechanic. Not even slightly. I once bled my brakes to improve their stopping power and roared off down the road, impatiently trying to get past a Range Rover. The Rangyy hit the brakes. And I hit mine, but nothing happened, and my front tyre hit the back of the Rangy. I catapulted up the seat and ‘gumphed’ to a halt, using my testicles as little airbags between me and my petrol tank. The Range Rover drove off and left me bent over the petrol tank, sweating, and breathing like an asthmatic hamster. I rode home and spent the night, periodically sighing, in front of the TV with a bag of frozen peas down my pants. So that’s me and simple mechanics.
And today, oil coming from the bike’s front brake – that was bad. On a motorbike, your life depends on the front brake. With the eyes of the tourists boring into the top of my head, I crouched down to fathom where the oil was coming from. The bike was new, so the oil was unsoiled and clear. I dipped my fingers in the oil sliding down the tyre’s spokes, and it was cold, but not particularly viscous. I sniffed it. And it didn’t smell of much – not that I knew how it should or shouldn’t smell. The seal at the gaiter looked dry, and there was no obvious origin or well-spot for the drippage. So, as so often in life, I asked myself, ‘what would someone, who knew what they were doing, do now’?
Still on my knees and still wondering, something in my peripheral vision jolted me out of my investigation. I turned my head, to be greeted by the blackness; the big black nose of a big, apparently happy, dog, who was sniffing at me. It took a second for me to get it, but one look up at the tourists’ now smiling faces explained everything; they’d seen everything. Apparently, it was this very dog’s freshly deposited wee, which I was erroneously investigating as spilled oil. Mr Cool has left the building. What a twat.

Give me strength.

I’ve just been to enter a painting in a competition hosted by the local library. The prize is thousands of dollars, but, more importantly, it would be a good inclusion on my art CV.

A few days ago, my neighbour, who pays his mortgage by selling his paintings, showed me the correct method of fixing brass hangers to the back of the piece, so they work with the uniform hanging system, which all galleries use. So I was ready to go; all very professional.

But I've got flu or Ebola, or some hideousness, so just to get myself out of bed by late afternoon to enter the painting before the deadline, I needed to give myself a serious talking to. By the time I was in the car, my internal dialogue had descended into a slanging match.

I arrived at the art show with the entry fee and painting. And I stood in line, red-eyed, shivering and sweating; trying to stop my eyes rolling back in my head, and half-expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder and direct me to the local injecting gallery.

My turn. I paid the entry fee and left the painting with some little, old lady. Time for bed via the pharmacy. But just as I was leaving, the lady looked at the back of the painting and asked where the wire for hanging the painting was.
“There isn’t any.” I said, confidently. “There never is. The rings are there for the hanging system. It’s the same for all galleries.”
“Well,” she croaked, with far too much relish for my liking, “this isn’t an art gallery; it’s a library. You need to get some wire from somewhere. I’ll leave the painting on the side until you get back.”
I imagine, it would have been frowned upon to punch her head clean off her shoulders, so, dutifully, I dragged my fevered corpse on a wire hunt to the nearest hardware shop - in the next suburb – where I’d just come from. I just wanted to go back to bed.

Half an hour later, I wobbled back into the library. I got down on the floor with my painting and was cursing my inability to either breathe properly, or to focus my glassy eyes on the tiny wire loops, when an authorititive sounding lady somewhere above me asked,
“What are you doing?”

I looked up, and she frowned at me over her halfmoon glasses.
“What the fuck does it look like?” I said inside my head and looked around for the old hag to point my shaking finger at. But she was probably out the back somewhere stirring a cauldron. So I calmly explained I was attaching the wire just as I'd been instructed.
“Well, we have a hanging system. We don’t need any of that, but you may as well finish now.”
I did finish it. Then I took a deep mouth-breath, gathered my dignity off the floor, smiled and left.
That’s how massacres start.

I'm sure he'd have some wise words on universal interconnectedness. If only I understood Khmer.

So it's 1990 in London. I'm at work and a supplier, about the same age as me, takes me and my work partner for a beer. Lubricated, the supplier, who's from London, originally from Bayswater, tells us about his mum, who was murdered when he was a child. Apparently, his mum was thrown or pushed out of, or at any rate involuntarily exited, a high window and was impaled on the steel railings below. Heavy stuff over a lunch time drink. I was expecting beer, crisps and politically incorrect jokes.

Fast forward twenty years.

So I'm talking to my 65 year old next-door neighbour in Sydney, Australia (as opposed to Sydney, Canada). Anyway, my neighbour's talking about when he was a travelling hippy, living in London in the 60's. And he tells me about the day when the lady next door, in Bayswater, was murdered by falling from a high building onto the railings below. Now, either that's a weird coincidence, or Bayswater in the 60s was a dangerous place to be out in the streets in anything less substantial than a car.

Maybe I'm just the kind of person,who brings out morbid, gory subjects in people - though he did tell me a good joke too.
Paddy goes for a job as a blacksmith.

Blacksmith: "So Paddy, do you have any experience shoeing horses?"
Paddy:"No, but I told a donkey to fuck off, once."

If it were in a novel, it would seem far fetched.

I found out today where socks go. Sometimes even in pairs. It was raining, so, for my walk up the road to the local café, I grabbed my waterproof coat. With its flaps and toggles, and Velcro to cover the whole front zip with a waterproof baffle, this thing would be overkill on Everest. I opened the door and was about to put my arm in the coat sleeve, but it was absolutely pouring down and my super-absorbent suede shoes weren't going to cut it. But I was on a coffee mission- that was non-negotiable; I needed to get my target heart rate for the day. So, another day older, and hopefully another day wiser, I went back to the bedroom to change my shoes. I chucked the coat on the bed, sat down and set about the whole unlacing and lacing palaver. Done. Coat on. Take two.

Head bowed against the rain, I walked up the road, and, just as I turned the corner to the shops, I patted my pockets to make sure I had a pen and paper. And something caught my eye. My heart missed a beat. It must have happened, when I threw the coat on the bed. From the very bottom of my jacket's Velcro zip-flap, a new, grey sock with a big, bright red toe section was dangling vertically, and very unsubtly, at crotch height, right between my legs. I ripped the sock off and stuffed it in my pocket. And looked around. No one had seen. Phew.

I had my coffee. And on the way home, I retraced my steps. And outside my next door neighbour’s there was the other sock. So that’s what happens to them.