We decided that on this occasion, the thing that would make our lives complete would be a dish of olives, which we could nibble delicately while sipping our cocktails and looking like film stars (albeit film stars with eyebrows like Julia Roberts circa 1988, a wardrobe from Mr Price, and filthy 8 month old plastic flipflops).

“Excuse me,” we said. “Could we please have a dish of olives?”

“?” said the waiter’s face.

“Olives? Do you have olives?”

“Yeeees,” said the waiter, uncertainly, looking at us as if we were dangerous criminals recently escaped from straitjacketed incarceration.

“May we have some please?”

“Yeeees,” said the waiter, backing away.

Now, it isn’t unsual here to be able to get a little bowl of olives to snack on. This isn’t beyond the realms of the reasonable. We could not understand why he seemed so thoroughly discombobulated, especially as this restaurant is relatively posh.

The waiter returned and laid the plate down in front of us. On it, staring gently at us, lay two olives, and a toothpick each.

We thought it best not to ask for any more.

In the UK, it is not customary to weigh and price your vegetables before going to the checkout, so taking my veggies to the vegetable drone took a little getting used to. I am on a roll with it now though, and I can even punch the vegetable code in by myself if they are unavailable for whatever reason, e.g. busy sneezing wetly all over the tomatoes, trying to hit people with plastic signs etc. Generally, though, if you try and weigh your own vegetables, you will be treated by the vegetable drone as if you are deliberately trying to get them fired, so I tend not to.

However, Woerman Brock have come up with a novel idea – they have dispensed with the vegetable drone, displaying, instead, a nice colourful board with pretty pictures of vegetables on it, so that you can weight them yourself. I like this.

Some people, surprisingly, are unable to grasp this simple concept. Take the sour-faced woman who was weighing her potatoes while I stood patiently waiting to stick a price sticker on my apple. She walked to the machine with potatoes in hand, and put them on the weighing thing. Then she huffed and puffed and looked around for the vegetable drone to come and punch the numbers in, because my god what else are peons for? I expect she’d just had a manicure or something. Or didn’t want to pick up any nasty germs from the clicky buttons.

While waiting impatiently, she inspected the potatoes in the bag and took one out because it had a scratch on it. She then left the potatoes on the machine and went to select a scratch-free potato. Then she got upset with me because I took the bloody potatoes off the machine while she was meandering around, and priced my apple. Myself.

Sometimes, though, I am forced to.

Take my local supermarket. I nip in there most days to buy my lunch. Lunch usually involves fruit, and for some reason whenever I go in there some guy is always mopping up by the fruit and veg stand. He is always shadowed by a fool whose only task appears to be to dry the floor by fanning it.

The first stupid thing is that he is fanning it with one of those bright yellow plastic “Attention! Wet Floor!” signs. Why? Why not just leave the yellow sign on the floor so that people can note it and say to themselves “Ooh, the floor is wet! I should be careful not to slip”.

The second stupid thing is that he does this with an enthusiasm that is almost theatrical. You can almost hear the director in his head shouting “Feel the length of your arm! You can fan wider if you just feel it”. This means that whenever I am in the supermarket, trying to select a pear or an avocado, I have to do it like Indiana Jones – ducking under the violent arm swings of a man wielding a heavy plastic sign.

Today, he was just using a piece of cardboard. He still managed to whack me a good one on the side of the face though. No apology, no “Oh my god, how stupid I am to be accidentally hitting the customers with soggy cardboard. I certainly look stupid with this gormless expression, but really, I had no idea. I will mend my ways. Would you like me to get the manager so you can bully him into giving you the fruit for free?”

He just carried on trying to start a hurricane in the pacific and staring into space with his mouth slightly open. Next time I’m going to try and get him to break my nose with his plastic sign, so that I can sue and live in clover for ever and ever. Those yanks are onto to something, truly.

“Eish, that is a long time.”

“Oh, it is September next year not this year?”

“Oh ok. [counts months off in his head; looks dismayed] Don’t forget it is my bike!”

Usually while he says these things, he’s clinging to the handlebars and admiring the bicycle’s fine lines and extraordinary streamlining. Well, he’s admiring something anyway. He absolutely cannot wait until I leave.

So, last week I came home on the bike, and he said “So, I am going away. I will be here tomorrow, and then the next day, and then I will be away in the north for two weeks. When I come back you will give me the bike? And also you must tell me that place where you get the bike mended and their number*, and I need everything. OK, I must go now, I must open the gate for these people!”

And he’s gone before I have a chance to argue. He’s trying to wrest the bike from my posession a full six weeks before I’m actually due to give it up – that’s how excited he is about it.

I feel a bit bad that I’m going to make him wait even longer for something that has been the object of his desire for almost two full years, but I reckon it’s character building. I mean, I’m going a bit frothy at the mouth waiting for my placement to be finished – it feels so close now, I just feel a bit limboish – but I’m going to have to learn to be patient. Some might say that if I haven’t learned how to be patient by now, I’m a lost cause, but it’s never too late in my opinion.

God, is it only 11.25? Sigh.

*It’s these people. They are wonderful, and have a really interesting bicycle ambulance project going on. You might want to give them some money. They’d really like it if you did.

“Rachael, are you busy?”

“Er…”, I look at my screen, which is probably showing my email, or a blog, or occasionally the google home page, for when I am struck with an urgent need to know something obscure, like “contents tartare sauce”, or “dream of corpses significance”.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

“I don’t know. What’s up?”

“My friend had a dream last night when she had shit all over her hands”. She extends her hands to me as if to demonstrate where the shit was. “What does it mean?”

I’m stumped. “I have absolutely no idea.”

“No, it’s ok, I’m looking it up on the internet. But how do you spell shit? Is it s h i t?”

I pause, trying to work out whether she’s likely to find a dream interpretation website that uses the word ’shit’, and wonder whether to tell her to use an alternative, like ‘faeces’ or ‘excrement’, and decide against it.

“Yes” I reply. Succinct, if nothing else, that’s me.

She wanders off, wiping her hands absentmindedly on her skirt.

************

Some kind visitors from South Africa brought a copy of The Express international edition into the office. I fucking hate the tabloids, but it was a joy to see a British newspaper, even if it is crap. I leave it lying on my desk and Kennedy walks in and absentmindedly starts to leaf through it.

“Wow, that palace is big”, he says, showing me a picture of Buckingham Palace. “Where is that palace? Is it in Liverpool?”

I stare at him, confused. “Nooo, I don’t believe it’s in Liverpool,” I reply.

“But the Queen, she is from Liverpool, isn’t it?”

“Er, no. No, the queen isn’t from Liverpool.” I’m trying not to laugh, even though there is no earthly reason why he would know where the queen is from.

“But she supports Liverpool in the football.”

“Does she? I didn’t know that.” I’m struck with a mental image of our monarch sat in front of the TV in a Liverpool shirt with a can of Heineken, shouting “You’ll never walk alone” at the TV, while Prince Philip plays keepy uppy in the corner.

“So where is this palace? Do you have one in every city?”

“It’s in London. No, there’s just that one. And a castle in Windsor. I think that’s it.”

He goes back to the paper, looking thoughtful.

**************

Over the last week wisps and folds of high cloud have been intruding on the days. They seem to make the wind that little bit colder, the day feel a little more wintry. On high-cloud days you notice the trees that have shed their leaves, and the yellowing grass on the municipal lawns. On high-cloud days the air smells of distant snow.

They’re also the days when the sunsets outdo themselves in splashes of rose, lilac and orange. I cycled home last night in awe, marvelling that the sky could look so wonderful in colours that if mixed together in a dress would have people reaching for a pair of shades, and whispering “My god, I didn’t know she was losing her sight, the poor afflicted girl.”

I stopped outside my gate to chat to David, the security guard next door, who is spending his days hopping about in the street and rubbing his hands together, wrapped from head to toe, his nose and eyes peeping from within the hood of his windcheater.

“Look at the sky!”, I said, delighted with it. “Isn’t it pretty!”

“No, that sky it is very bad”, he replied, shaking his head in distress. “That sky, it means fevers, and the cattle will die. It is that sky that brings the cough. It is not a good thing, that sky.”

“But it’s only a little bit of cloud. And it looks so beautiful when the sun sets,” I said. “How can it make the cattle die?”

“Everyone here, they know that the clouds are not good for the cattle, or for the people. It is why we all have cough.” He pronounces it “cowf”, and I realise now that that’s what he’s been asking me every day for the last week, concern written all over his face.

“Do you have a cough?” I asked.

“No. Do you?”

“No. So I guess we’ll be ok for now.”

As the gate closes behind me, I take a last look at the flaming horizon.

Another day done.

The one concession I have to winter is a two bar electric heater in my office, which heats up a little pocket of air about a foot square by my left foot. For some reason, people I work with deem it critically important to put a bowl of water by the heater so that it doesn’t dry the air out with its furnace-like powers. It’s a mystery to me what they think will happen if they forget to do this – maybe their skin will blister and flake off in the intense dryness; maybe their lungs will shrivel up, or the air in the office will become unbreathable. I don’t know. Seeing as I don’t deem it necessary to do this other kind people usually place a bowl of water by my desk at some point in the day, so I keep forgetting it’s there, knocking it over every time I move my wheelie chair, and muttering “For fuck sake” under my breath.

Effectively, every five minutes or so I’m tipping a bucket of water over an electrical applicance – this without counting the number of times I’ve almost set fire to various items of clothing hanging off the back of the chair.

Health and safety? It’s a wonder I’m still alive.

On this occasion, I had had to leave the group in the capable hands of my colleague, who was busy setting up the sound system, in order to go and pick up a group of kids from a nearby school. I was concerned that Victor was going to have an aneurysm he was so furious at being required to do this, so I accompanied him, trusting my colleague to entertain the gaggle of primary school children with music while we were gone. “Entertain them with music” I said, thinking that he would put on one of his Celine Dion CDs and all would be well.

I returned, some twenty minutes later. I could hear the stereo from approximately two miles away. And blasting out of it, into an audience of ten year olds, came the following words:

“THIS IS ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT BROUGHT TO YOU BY SLIM SHADY.”

Oh Christ. I made it out of the bus before it had even stopped moving, and ran towards the stereo, waving my arms around in a panic-driven semaphore.

“SLIM SHADY DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK.”

“Noooooooooo…. Stop stop stop turn it off turn it OFF Oh my god…” I ran past some teachers who were waiting for the show to begin.

“IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT YOU CAN SUCK HIS FUCKING COCK.”

“Turn it off!” I screamed at my colleage. “OFF! My god, are you mad?”

He just didn’t get it. He looked at me, my hands full of hair, wild-eyed and breathless, and said “What’s the problem?”.

I spent the rest of the day imagining what those kids’ parents would say if they came home reciting Eminem verbatim, courtesy of our organisation, and more of my hair turned white.

We sat for a while, waiting for the car to fill up and I started to eat a strawberry. I bought the strawberries because I was hungover, and needed to make my insides feel pampered after the battering they’d had the night before. Strawberries are scientifically proven to do this. If you can also add champagne and/or melted chocolate then you have an instant cure, but a strawberry on its own will work wonders on a bilious constitution.

Liverwurst, however, will not. I didn’t notice it until after she got in the cab, because I was too busy trying to find space in which my lungs could expand. She was vast. One of her thighs was the size of two of mine. Her flesh moved in a way that reminded me of marine tides and the gravitational pull of the moon. A pair of flimsy shoes attempted bravely to contain the chunks of meat that were her feet. Clutched in her fist, her thick fingers curling posessively around half its girth, was a liverwurst the size of a dachshund.

And, oh my god, the smell. Don’t get me wrong – I love sausage. I don’t even object to liverwurst in moderation, even though it smells of cheap dog-food. But this thing was huge, and she was taking planet sized chunks out of the side of it, they way you would a 99 flake or a cornetto. Also, I was quite hungover and not really too happy to be trapped in a corner while meaty gusts ruined the enjoyment of my strawberry, which in any case now seemed to taste only of liverwurst.

So I spent the journey with my elbows trapped against my sides, trying avoid breathing (not so tough when you’re being crushed), while the sound of open-mouthed mastication went on, and on, and on by my left ear.

The taxi ride was interminable.

“Hello, may I speak to Julia please?”

“I’m afraid Julia’s… unavailable right now. Can I take a message?”

“Ummmmm. Mmmmmm. Is she far away?”

“No. She’s in the bathroom.”

“Oh, ok. How long will she be in there?”