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Three extraordinary things happened today. Something else happened that was actually rather bad.

The first of the nice things was an email I received when I arrived at the office.

I guess you’d be somewhat surprise reading this mail, but that is okay. I got your contact after browsing through the pages of the computer oriented magazine ‘What PC’ that was given to me by a Red Cross staff.

My name is **, a 26yrs. Sierra Leone refugee residing in The Gambia since the 27th May ‘01. I am poor and destitute. It is a long story how I came here; I lost my family and everything in the foolish war that ravage my country. I managed to come to The Gambia through the help of some UN troop and since then, I have been staying at a local charity home in the hamlet of Nagora, in Basse helping out to look after the children in the home.

I’ve not written for WhatPC for about two years, but it’s nice to know the prose lives on.

The second was a cure for hiccups that actually works. Dylan explained what causes them. Something to do with constricted muscles in the chest or something. I was disturbing the whole office with particularly loud hiccups most of the afternoon until he explained the cure. The trick (which deserves to be written up in HTML and posted to its own domain) is to stretch out your arms as far as you can, breathe in as deep as you can and swallow hard.

I did it, not believing it would do anything, and the hiccups went. Immediately. Perhaps it was because I believed they would go that they did. Whatever the cause, though, it was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever come across.

Both of those paled into insignificance in comparison to episode three, though.

I was at Soup Works at lunchtime, at the back of a long queue that snaked out through the door and onto the pavement. It was pouring with rain and the guy at the front of the queue had a big order, so we were going nowhere fast. I had my coat pulled tight around me to try and keep out the rain and my shoulders were hunched up to stop it going down my neck.

Then, for no reason other than to be kind, the woman in front of me in the queue, who was half in the dry already, stepped back out into the rain so that she could hold her umbrella over the two of us. Very kind, and so very un-London. She’s clearly not a local. I felt quite guilty after that that when we eventually did get in there my soup took a lot less time to serve than hers and I ended up in front of her in the queue for the till. I thought if I let her go ahead she might think I had taken her moments of umbrella kindness as more than they were, though, so I had to stand there in front feeling rude.

I met Chris the midnight weatherman on the train home, though, and as if to balance out my three amazing experiences we got back to my car at the station and found that it had been broken into.

I didn’t notice at first. There was a little business card tucked into the frame of the window, which I pulled off and dropped on the floor. Some get-rich-quick scheme or other. You get them at least once a week. I was more bothered about that than the bits and pieces strewn across the inside of the car, and it wasn’t until I had opened the door and was about to sit down that I saw what had happened.

The strange thing is that I usually leave the bag with my gym kit in it on the back seat. This morning, though, for no reason at all, I lifted it off the seat and put it in the boot when I arrived at the car park, thinking that it was tempting thieves if I left it on display. I’m wondering if whoever did it saw me do that and thought that because I was making a special effort with it there must be something worth having.

There wasn’t, as they found out when they went through it and stuffed my used kit behind the passenger seat. Even my trainers are about five years old and have no life left in them. In the end they took a tube of hair gel (used twice so still full), a deodorant (perhaps they are smelly thieves), about

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2002 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.