Sit down next to me

I tried sitting under a tree in the park. I had the second volume of David Kynaston's history of post-war Britain and a couple of bottles of cider.

A bra-heightened fortyish woman walked on the footpath in front of me with her shoulders back, hair all shimmering, her lovely tits forward, relaxed. White shirt. She returned my look, smiled at me, and carried on sashaying past.

Alas, an aggressive hay fever drove me home snotting, weeping, phelgming and itching. Mixed excrescences running down my cheeks at the pedestrian crossing; wiping my nose on my sleeve, too stuffed with pollen to care what it looked like.

As I was working the train yesterday, my supervisor rings, asking me if I could go to C--- today to be shown how to use the ramps to get disabled people on to the new trains that are to be Transport That Fails's saviour. And then do my normal shift.

I agreed to this, thinking I was a manful negotiator for asking for three-and-a-half hours overtime, whilst knowing in my head that it was wrong. In my bed last night, I seethed and wriggled, irritated with my weakness in not saying "hang on, it's either the training in C--- or my shift, not both." So as a way of punishing them for their audacity, I rang them at half eight this morning with a story about a collapsed toilet in the flat above me.

A few months ago someone's toilet shifted as he was sat on it, rupturing the flimsy floor on which it was anchored. A solution of his shit and piss dripped into the communal room downstairs for hours until anyone went in there and discovered the leak. I adapted the story for my own purposes, saying that I would have to stay in for the contractor. Everyone knows it's a lie.

Mel is away for a couple of weeks in Greece at a wedding, so armed with Loratidine and something for the journey, I am off to Poynton in Cheshire, to look at a roundabout. It's one of those things that men do when their girlfriends aren't around.

My interest in it arose from a fascinating Lancaster Civic Society talk about it years ago, which explained how the village's main crossroads were in desperate need of something that considered the safety of its inhabitants, above all, its pedestrians. I've always wanted to see the results for myself. The junction could hardly have been any worse before the alterations, as you can see from the opening minute or so of this youtube video about it, made shortly after its completion. I'd like to see how it's faring, a decade later.

And after an afternoon's hard work examining roundabout remodelling developments in Cheshire, I'm up to Manchester for pizza and beer with my middle daughter -- which is a more attractive pair of jobs in one day than the two that my employer was trying to get me to do.