| Monday, September 24, 2001 |
 | One of the gifts I received on my birthday, inevitably from an inhabitant of Brighton, was a collection of organic foodstuffs. On the Tube back to my place on Sunday, weak with hunger and hangover, we cracked open the ethical chocolate and scarfed away.
Have you ever been punched on the nose? No, go on, you must have. Along with the dizziness, the nausea and the pain (none of which, thankfully, accompanied the eating of this chocolate bar), there is the taste of rust, salt and oily water gathering just above the roof of your mouth as the sinuses rupture and blood drips into every inhalation. Inexplicably, a sensation precisely mimicked by this particular, presumably iron-rich chunk of chocolatey goodness.
I can see the adverts now - "Try the great taste of running your tongue over the space left by a recently-lost tooth over and over again!"
The other fascinating thing about the journey back was myself and a friend getting into a brief chat with a very attractive woman sitting opposite, who joined me in astonishment that my companion's youthful experience of the "found a peanut" song had been limited to the first line repeated over and over again, thus omitting the entire narrative of it being moldy, eating it, going to heaven and so on. This would, we both concluded, have been really annoying. Just hearing about it having happened fourteen years ago was pretty annoying.
Point being, we sadly did not have time during this brief pre-London Bridge exchange to ask why she was carrying with her a slim, wood-backed full-length mirror. The probable answer, I know, would have been that she was transportng it from one place to another, probably a place of trade to a place of living. But would it not be marvellous if, cursed as she was with those healthy, well-planed English good looks, she had to carry with her a full-length mirror at all times as a kind of geas, lest her reflection escape her forever.
Or that she was just very, very vain indeed.
"No. I just like to have the option of looking at my own person at all times, it being far more prepossessing than any other feature, human or natural, of this journey."
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