Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

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.

The photograph below was taken by my niece, Hayley on her mobile phone last week on Mothers' Day. The event was the baptism of her friend's baby, both pictured.

It is not the best of photos even for a phone camera: it is shaky and not well focused. What is interesting though, is the background. There appears to be the blurred image of a the head and shoulder of a man, possibly an old man, wearing glasses between the camera lens and the plaque on the church wall. My first thought was that it was a reflection on the plaque, but it is too large and seems to partially obscure the wreath below.



Apart from downloading it from my phone to my computer and uploading to Photobucket, all I have done is rotate the picture ninety degrees.

Do any of the fair number of photographers on my friends list have any thoughts as to how the image might have got on to the picture and what it may be? I am informed that there was no-one there behind the woman and baby when the picture was taken.