why do all the beautiful women get off at highbury & islington?

obviously not a general rule, it's just happened too many times to not mention it... i think it's about affluence...

now i cycle more, my experience of the tube is thrown into sharper relief, i still feel very much at home down there, even as i embrace the wonderfully healthy feeling of cycling, a news item last night quoted a report that said it is more hygienic to wipe your hand around the inside of a toilet bowl, than to wipe it on a seat on the london underground...

so i was coming home tonight, after a vegetarian meal with L @ mildred's, good food, but too often a bit bland... bizaare how they can make such wonderful ingredients loose their taste...? i'm being overly harsh because i've eaten really well in there often, but a few times now i've been a little disapointed by the taste... anyway, coming home, reading justine by lawrence durrell, i look up and there is an attractive woman sat opposite me, she looks at me, i look at her, that's all,

i'm still reading as we pull into highbury and islington and i already know that she's going to get off at this stop, too well dressed for finsbury park... lo and behold... not that had she got off at my stop i would have spoken to her even... just that slight almost flirt... not to be...

i was reading justine on the train yesterday on the way to hammersmith, the only work related tube travel i have these days and therefore one of the few times i've been reading... i reached page 66, the prose picking up a pace, the style beginning to add up to something...

but for the most part these alexandrian girls are distinguished from women in other places only by a

mer suit.

page 66 went straight on to page 71...

nonplussed.

this was just as i was getting to work, i was going straight from work to bo's private view, only then to home... potentially two more journeys without the book, unless i just read on from page 71, (like the uncle of i forget who now who only ever read the right hand pages of any book he read, so he could be comfortable lying down and reading), and even though i've read the alexandria quartet of books before there was no way i could do it...

once home last night, a little worse for wear, i read through the appropriate pages in my other (even tattier) copy of the book, i'm back on it today, just met balthazar, namesake of my beautiful balthazara... loving it...

so just a few words about bo's show, the end of her textiles course, i loved her work, i probably would have told her i loved it even if i hadn't but i really did love it... all about her family, a picture of her mum holding her, reprinted as a pattern on cloth, a photo of her grandmothers room that she'd never been in, her installation a recreation of that kind of space... a hanging thin grey material off to one side which bo told me was there so you could look through it at the rest of her work and it made it like an old photograph...

such a coherent piece of work, really nice to see bo so satisfied and surrounded by friends...

x