Monday 23rd January, 2017                                2230

If ever I wasted a day, today was it.

Please don’t ask but I decided to go to RT Mart. Why?  To buy a French stick and see if they were stocking any cheese now. Or if truth be known, possibly just to shake off the sense of isolation I feel.

Being the sensible cove I turned in just after five this morning and set my alarm for ten. It doesn’t take a PhD to realise that the carcase I dragged out of bed this morning was of course sorry. I was still on choke until finally I decided to venture out at 1400.

Google had told me that once I got to the main train station I needed the number 10 bus (9 stops) or the 114 or 801 (stops undetermined as that information was not given). I was expecting an hour and a half each way with thirty minutes to shop and have a smoke in between.

The traffic was so bad it took an hour and a half just to get to the station but despite the fact I was faced with probably the same again to get to where I wanted, I scanned the station for the connecting buses but to no avail. By now it was past 1530 and mental calculations told me that even if I continued and made it, I wouldn’t be home until eight at the earliest. This trip at best should be viewed as a day’s outing, which is utterly ridiculous when you consider it is simply being made in the confines of the same city!

I got off the 131 bus but after seeing no evidence of any of the buses I could have taken onward and got back on after having a few puffs on a cigar. The same bus I had arrived on and Lord knows what the driver thought. On the way home I had the most idiotic thought. To console myself for the wasted journey I would try out the Pizza Hut not far from home. Surely a small pizza and a beer would be some recompense?

No. For starters personal pizzas were not available - presumably they only have half a dozen small trays available and they were in use. Instead of ordering a pasta dish I ordered the next size up pizza, a seafood mania and instead of a beer, I was feeling mightily hacked off and so asked for a bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

Well the wine was very nice and the pizza, whilst hardly winning any points from Egon Ronay (or Anton Ego for that matter) was naturally too much for me. Of course I asked for a bag to take away the half I never ate but refused the box, I only wanted a bag because I knew I was going to leave it for the wild dogs. Why I had the idiotic notion to go there I know not because whatever they cook as long as I have the ingredients I can cook it better but I came away 217y worse off.

I did though get talking to a couple of young ladies. I don’t know their names but it passed an hour, one was a student, the other had a job and unbelievably neither had been to see the coloured mountains. I asked for their QQ addresses so as to send my photos and to my disappointment one of them was invalid when I came to send them. It may have been inadvertent but neither needed to have worried - I don’t have a QQ account myself and they certainly weren’t my type but I sent the photos to one, expressed my dismay and asked her to relay them to the other. It saddens me to think at least one had that opinion of me.

What a waste of an afternoon. There is of course some good to be found in all of this. With less than five hours sleep last night/this morning, I am absolutely knackered. In fact I fell asleep on my chair and the only reason I am typing this is because eventually I fell sideways and cracked my head on the window sill which rather brought me to my senses.

I may well try again  tomorrow but this time I will set my alarm for eight and leave at ten. Just for French bread (and not particularly good bread at that) and the off chance of some cheese? No, just to get out of the house.