If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It’s horrible being without my regular PC. It sits on my desk with its side off doing a good impression of the almost-as-useless Orak from Blake’s 7. It’s a sad sight.

It’s also stubbornly refusing to let me get at my email and - perhaps worst of all - the 1,000 or so MP3s that help get me through the day. The notebook I have temporarily liberated from the lab is a poor characterless substitute that neither sings nor chats to my friends. Who cares if it’s ten times as powerful?

So, to try and make things better we all headed off to Soho Square for lunch to sit on the grass amid the topless fit media types. The sun was scorching and forced us to buy ice cream against our will, which dripped on our hands and crossed legs. One brave guy stripped down to a pair of microscopic swimming trunks and exposed a body that should have been left inside its wrapping, but there was no sign of red pants man.

He was there yesterday, as he has been for every sunny day of the last six years, with his bandaged knee, high-tech gadgets and barely decent bright red pants. He’s been a pensioner a good many years already, and as every new summer arrives we wonder whether he’s made it through the winter.

We wondered that again today as we walked from our desks to the square. Perhaps he’s died, someone said, and perhaps he has, as when we arrived, he was nowhere to be seen. His regular spot was left empty, the grass he would normally flatten sitting upright and proud.

The last time we said that about someone we’d not seen for a few days had been just last week.

Yesterday they closed the tea shop so they could bury him.

I hope we’ve not cursed red pants man, too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2003 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.