Mixed Fortunes and Foreigners.

Today was one of those days when you begin to take seriously the notion that there’s some sort of superior being controlling your affairs, and today it’s in a particularly vindictive mood. Delays, malfunctions, damage, dire prospects looming large… all of which caused me to forget things which resulted in yet more difficulty. And the weather being cold, dull and depressingly wet didn’t help. I tend to feel more ill than usual on such days.

But there was one compensation: smiley women. Several of them. The best was a woman in Sainsbury’s who declined to stop smiling at me even when I looked away and looked back again. She was middle aged and wearing a long padded coat, jeans turned up at the ankle, and Doc Martin boots, which probably explains everything. And then there was the woman I’ve been seeing frequently for several years and who has never smiled at me before, but did so twice today. I find such behaviour quite inexplicable, but there you are.

On a more serious note, I was surprised to see two women of evident foreign extraction sitting at adjoining tables in the coffee shop. One looked vaguely Levantine and was obviously Muslim because she was wearing a hijab, and the other was Chinese. This is most unusual for Ashbourne because Ashbourne isn’t that sort of town. Ashbourne is a middle class, right-leaning sort of place with an elderly demographic and a tediously white complexion. It’s the sort of place where people worship Edward Elgar for the wrong reason because they can’t see the music for the jingoism. It does have one token black man who I see on average about once every three or four months, but apart from during the tourist season the operative word would be something like ‘pasty.’

And incidentally, neither of the two women-of-evident-foreign-extraction smiled at me, which just goes to show that you can never trust foreigners to behave normally.