In the back of my mind was a slight niggle that the stuff I wrote about handbags in this post had been nicked from somewhere. And it had. From me. I wrote this about five (five! Bloody hell how did 60 months go past so fast?) years ago when I was clearly less grammatically lazy and possibly slightly more amusing.

Miss Hillary Yoghurt in seat 33d provided a fascinating insight into the oldest of Japanese arts – Feng Shui . Clearly attached to a somewhat bedraggled and whiffy holdall, she refused to file it in the overhead lockers where it would have probably eaten the other luggage. Rather, she spent the whole six hour flight rearranging items from her trivia bag via an extended transit to the table in front of her.

Root, Root, oh here’s a comb, clean off the suspicious discharge from the prongs, place it carefully on the side of the table, rotate it 15 degrees, sit back, frown, rotate it the other way 5 degrees, sit back, suck hair, furrow brows, delve back into bag and start again with a boiled sweet. I watched helplessly in some kind of sick admiration that anyone could be this dull as item after item was plucked from what I now thought of as the trivia tardis”, arranged, re-arranged and then if it for some reason didn’t pass muster dispatched unloved back into the hell-sack.

After 3 hours, the table looked like the winner of the worst bric-a-brac stall at the village fate. My barks of laughter were covered hastily by phlegmy coughs but even without my impression of advanced TB, she would never have noticed as each item was subjected to a Krishna like chant delivered in a base grunt that would have had most of us calling the RSPCA, or gunning for the person doing something that sexually obtuse to a cat.

This is from a journal written to commemorate a wet, damp, painful and rather uplifting cycling trip to Ecuador raising money for Cancer relief. It’s a roller coaster of a novelette in 14 loquacious chapters and when I’m feeling lazy (so that’s ALL THE TIME then), I’ll post a few of the choicer bits.