Today

[caddyman]

My right knee is definitely giving me gyp. It’s not so bad when I get out of bed in a morning, but it doesn’t take much effort on my part for it to start getting achey, particularly if I am standing around rather than walking. Add to this the general creakiness I get from sitting in this excuse for a chair I have in the office and I am wondering whether I might not be better off using my kneecap as an ashtray and having my leg welded straight so I can stump around like a cross between Long John Silver and Frankenstein’s monster. Given that the kneecap feels loose, for want of a better word, perhaps First World War style puttees extended up and around the knee would help, but then that would start a strange transformation into Mummy movies.

Someone has been splicing time and space in North London again. You rarely see many operatives in the Totteridge & Whetsone area using nuclear accelerators to weld reality back in place¹, so there tends to be more obvious outbreaks of oddness on the extended reaches of the tube network than there are in the centre. Or rather, they are less controlled. I guess it’s a Men in Black thing.

Anyway, there was a woman on the tube this morning who looked like she had been assembled from various elements of Eastenders, Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Abba, circa 1976. Imagine a middle-aged elf wearing a silvery circlet on her forehead and trying to arrange something over a mobile phone in an Essex accent and you’ll get a portion of the picture.

She disappeared mysteriously at Camden Town, just where the reality operatives start congregating in earnest, so I feel my point is made.

Creepy Swedish Guy was on the train this morning, too. First time I’ve seen him for a while. He has new reading glasses that make him look like a goblin watch repair man.

¹As a regular reader, you will recall that sometime back in the summer, it was suggested by some one in my comments section – I have it in mind that it was either jfs or littleonionz - that tourists with wheely cases are actually disguised space-time engineers who repair and maintain the fabric of reality in central London and other major cities, helping to combat alternate reality leaks that let through the occasional pieces of the past, mythology or other dimensions.

Comments

[ellefurtle.livejournal.com]

And don't forget we saw Dr Watson on the Northern line not too long ago!

"Goblin watch repair man"

[ladkyis.livejournal.com]

Recently Mr M has required spectacles for reading small print, and purchased a pair in Tesco for the princely sum of £2.50. The first time he put them on he was reading something out loud and he kept looking over the top of the lenses to see our reaction. DD and I were leaning against each other laughing because he looks just like the illustration of the shoemaker on the cover of the Ladybird book "The Elves and the Shoemaker". He wasn't that amused until I said that it was one of the few characters from fairy story that I loved because he was such a lovely gentleman.

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

The law students who attend the drop-in where I work use wheely-cases all the time, typically in such a way that they get stuck in the door.

The idea that some of them may be repairing space/time rifts fills me with horror, I must say.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

Well, look at the state of the world and judge their success for yourself!

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

*shudder*

[jfs.livejournal.com]

I think it was littleonionz but then I immediately stole the idea for my own nefarious purposes.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

I thought you were caught up in this somewhere... ;-)

[bluesman.livejournal.com]

So, you have confirmed a belief I firmly held when I lived in London, that the Northern Line really is an irritatingly unstable rift in The Time/Space Continuum. My mum used to pull one of those wheeled grocery carriers behind her in town a couple of times a week. Now I know what she was doing and why she was always so knackered and narked when she came home.

[caddyman.livejournal.com]

A happy combination of your Mum's efficiency and the low number of visitations in Newport clearly meant that AGS excepted, the town was quite normal. It would have required a greater number of adepts with shopping trollies to shut the rift and expel the Guymers, Milburns and Keists of this (or the other) world.