Suddenly it’s late on Thursday night, which means dad arrives in less than 24 hours. The flat needs hoovering, washing needs to be done and the kitchen needs to be cleaned. It doesn’t help he’s meeting me at the office tomorrow so we can travel home together - no chance for a sneaky clean after work.

Yesterday was not a good day for riding the tubes. Or the buses come to that. The Central Line is still out of action and it looks like staying that way until the end of March now. So, it was the increasingly familiar trek to Euston Square, which turned out to be closed. As was Kings Cross, which had been sealed off with Police Line tape, flashing lights and inappropriately parked cars.

The streets were a seeting mess of confused commuters chattering into mobile phones about road blocks and closed stations and explaining to better halves that they had no idea when they’d make it home.

With no sign of anything other than the exclusion zone growing any time soon I set out east on foot, cutting down Grays Inn Road past ITN, which I’ve not seen since my last show on LBC. Back then it was a drizzly Sunday afternoon and most of London was away from the city. Last night it was a raining cold evening and the road was at a standstill. A long line of empty buses was parked up along the kerb, disgorged of passengers, while drivers stood out in the road, in spite of the rain, with their engines switched off and their car doors open.

Everywhere, the talk was of bombs. Quite natural, I suppose, when there are 1,500 troops and 450 armed police at Heathrow at the moment. When I (eventually) got home I switched on LBC News to catch talk of military jets patroling the skies of the city. That was much later, though, as I still had a long walk ahead - a couple of hours all told. I wish I’d known about the closure before I left and stayed in the office a while longer, or taken a more direct route home.

I’d made plans to gym with Kevin, which of course fell through. I’d sent him a text to rearrange and missed the one he sent back saying OK, so traipsed around to his after all and found his house shut up and deserted.

All I wanted was a bath, so after the abortive trip to Kevin’s front door I came home to defrost soup and ran a deep, hot bath that I soaked in as the soup slowly cooked. Ate it in front of Sex in the City which after a lacklustre start has evolved into a stonking penultimate series.

Was interrupted by a pizza delivery for a Simon Timms, apparently at this address. Strangely familiar name, but I sent the pizza away anyway.

So, after a bad journey home last night I should have guessed it would be crap this morning, too. Something to do with emotional breakdown or signal failure or something similar at Baker Street had shut down three quarters of the tube network and the entire population seemed to be out on the streets. Enough drivers to have kept the city finances in the black for a year if congestion charging had been introduced a week early.

It took a good three hours, an hour of them spent on a freezing, static bus, to get from Chelmsford to Soho. Whoever hinted that by the 2000s home working would be a reality was a cruel teaser.

Finished shopping for dad’s birthday presents at lunchtime, trawling Old Compton Street with Emilie and Kathryn. On the deskbound return trip we passed through Soho Square where a pigeon was wearing a plastic bag the way a bike courier would sling his satchel - over its head, onto a shoulder and then down across its body and under a wing.

Emilie did her best to creep around the Square and pick it up, but it flew away before she could get her hands on it. It landed on the other side of the grass where a rather less careful passer-by stamped on the bag and trapped the bird - precisely what Emilie had avoided. Anyhow, the bag was taken off and it flapped away, and about 50 other pigeons followed on behind it, clearly keen to gossip.

Susie came in mid-afternoon for tea and so we could wish her a happy birthday. We gave her presents and a cake full of fruit from Patisserie Valerie. We lit sparklers and write happy birthday in the air, and filled the office with sharp, bitter smoke.

Met up with Kevin for a gym session after work, to make up for missing out yesterday evening. It turns out he wasn’t out at all when I knocked - just tucked up in bed watching TV.

It was my first real gym session - as opposed to swimming - in several days, and it certainly felt like it. I’m feeling quite creaky now, but then I’ve done Tesco, too, since then which may have contributed. Nevertheless, we had a good workout and then sat in the sauna for 15 minutes to soften up the joints.

It turns out that, in spite of knowing each other eight years now and never ever been short of things to talk about week after week after week, not only did I not know Kevin’s last name, but he didn’t know mine either. Very strange.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 13th, 2003 at 11:16 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.