Travelling as a Recluse.

I was sitting on a brick wall in Uttoxeter today, quietly eating a fresh cream doughnut, when a young man approached and greeted me like an old friend. He asked how I was; he said it was good to see me; he told me he’d had a crusty baguette for lunch and a fry up for breakfast. And all the time he had a relaxed smile on his face as though life was good and there was nowhere better in the world to be.  He said something about a cigarette and I asked him whether he wanted a roll up. ‘No,’ he said, and then walked away still smiling. I’ve no idea who he was.

Such an encounter isn’t entirely unexpected in Uttoxeter. A little unusual perhaps, but not entirely unexpected. Uttoxeter is that sort of town. I remember seeing a man sitting on the same brick wall once – a man who expressed his evidently severe learning difficulties through the look in his eyes and the bellow in his voice – happily vomiting over his trousers while his minder prepared to clean him up. You never see people like that in Ashbourne. Ashbourne is self-consciously genteel and such people are generally kept hidden. Or maybe there aren’t any such people in Ashbourne. How can one know?

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So tonight I went to Newark, NJ and watched the movie Garden State. The female lead was so astonishingly like a young actress I knew in my theatre days that watching her was quite mesmerising. Same looks, same mannerisms, same facial expressions, same dippy, let’s-go-get-it attitude. Katy had slightly longer legs and a slightly different walk, but otherwise they could have been twins.

Katy was the one I mentioned in a post a few months ago, the one who didn’t realise that a turkey takes a long time to cook if you’re to avoid salmonella poisoning. She was very young, newly married, and Christmas dinner was taken very late that night. The following Christmas was spent at their flat in London, and Katy delighted in telling everybody that she imagined she and I were married because I’d pressed my trousers in her bedroom while she was arranging her make up. I remember the look on her husband’s face. Seems he didn’t approve. And she was the one who lay down on the snowy pavement at about 4am one freezing New Years Eve in order to get a better look at the moon. When I declined to join her she mocked me mercilessly.

So you see, life and its little journeys can sometime be mildly interesting even for a reclusive type like me, as long as you’re content to be always on the outside looking in. I wouldn’t know how to have it any other way.

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Tomorrow I’ll probably go to New Jersey again, to see Dr House this time and find out how he’s getting on with Cutthroat Bitch. There are things I dislike about House, but often he reminds me of me. He certainly ends up alone in some very familiar situations. No more cutthroat bitches or young actresses for me, though. The window is still there to look through, but the door doesn’t get opened any more.

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In the past 24hrs my blog has been visited by people from the UK, the US, Indonesia, Portugal, Russia and Hungary, so it seems the world is at my feet after all. In a manner of speaking.