Flatmate Situation

The situation is thus: Your flatmate, drunk after a night out has just taken a massive dump in your loo, and the gas has permeated your flat, congealing the very air you breath. You encounter him on his way out. You know he's the culprit. How do you extract the most humour from the situation?

1. Deeply inhale the stench, and declare "MMM....SPICY !!"
2. "Did you go to an eat-what-you-catch restaurant ? I think you caught the diarrhoea"
3. Feign death by choking.
4. Purloin the nearest air freshener and spray the fucker till he has blisters. Best done whilst chanting  "Unclean..Unclean"
5. If you have a sowing kit , prepare it and advance on him menacingly. "The hellmouth must be sealed".
6. "Did you eat my burnt hair collection?"
7. Hit him over the head with a newspaper "No, NO biological weapons in this house"

any other suggestions?

Ed: I am not his only flatmate. Cassar.

The Road Not Taken

Safe to say, since creating an outlet for my rage there has been little to upset me on my journeys. This in itself upsets me. Clearly cyclists were not made to be happy people.
The fun story of today is one of drive-by arguments. I spent a large portion of my way to work this morning inwardly cursing drivers who poke their nose out of a junction into the cycle lane, hoping somebody will let them in. Firstly, you need to consider that other people are just like you. If you are someone who lets others into traffic ahead of you (good on you), you'll almost certainly do it regardless of whether their cars are halfway into the road already. If not, the car isn't far enough into your lane to stop you, so you'll still ignore it. Nobody benefits from your front wheels getting better acquainted with the white lines they are supposed to be behind. But some of us are forced to go around your car. Some of us are forced out of the safety of cycle lanes and into fast moving traffic that still doesn't understand what signalling on a bike means.

I have an hour long journey to work so eventually I ended up with a finished article of fantasy:
A car has it's nose out into the cycle lane. Rather than swerving around it, I park my bike in front of it and stop to yell at the driver: "You see what happens when you don't stop at the junction but carry on into the road?! You do exactly what I'm doing to you now. You block people off. You are in my fucking way. You are making my journey dangerous because now I have to swerve into fucking traffic. Stop fucking doing it!"
( I don't rant very dramatically when cycling fast. Also, monologues are always a better fantasy because in reality I'm nearly always cut off by the car behind me beeping or the driver just screaming FUCK YOU!)

The other great missed opportunity happened on my way home. A woman was waiting to cross a full 10 yards away from a zebra crossing. As I cycled past her, she yelled, "the crossing is meant for you to stop too!" My normally far too slow brain was quick as lightning but still not fast enough for me to quip back before I'd cycled on round the corner, "there's also a red light in half a mile. Would you like me to stop now?"
If she'd been waiting at the crossing, I might have stopped.

I say might because truthfully I probably wouldn't have. I was trying to beat my time and there's actually plenty of room on the crossing for both of us if she starts to cross. I know that's wrong of me but it didn't actually happen and I stand by the concept that I can't be held responsible for the bad actions I don't have the opportunity to carry out. If bad intentions alone are what we are judged on, I'm screwed already. There have been many times when I've felt like picking up my bike and throwing it through someone's windscreen but I can't because inexplicably there's someone sitting on the bike, riding it. How dreadfully unfair!

There have also been times when I've felt like slaughtering kittens but that's a whole different issue between me and my psychiatrist and, frankly, none of the woman at the zebra crossing's business.

Rage Averted

Ok, so as first posts go, this won't set a great precedent. But my journey home was characterised by one moment of extreme stupidity and happily fixed - or at least turned to entertainment. A middle-aged woman started it (it's always them. If they're young, it's being ditzy; if they're old, it's being senile; but if you're middle-aged, you will be despised for your incompetence.) . She pressed the pedestrian crossing and the light turned green so she crossed the road - so far so good. I saw a red light so I stopped - no problems there. But as the light turned to green for me and red to her, she was still in the middle of the road. She wasn't walking slow or had innocently tripped. Instead this moron was talking on her phone and eating a sandwich at the same time and wandering this way and that across the crossing, saying "I can't see you anywhere. Could you wave or something?"

Firstly, it's fucking rude to eat while on the phone. I can't see you're eating and speak accordingly so either there are long gaps in the conversation and I think you're not listening or I can hear your horrible munching noises down the phone, which you are still inexplicably holding next to your mouth. I'm thankful that video calling hasn't caught on yet because otherwise I'd have to see your half-digested food as well. Talk to me then finish your sandwich. Or better yet, eat your food then call me to find out where I am. From now on, if I ever hear food noises down the phone I'm hanging up.

Back to the moment (yes, I managed to get that thought process done before she'd finished being insane). I sat on my bike, too amazed to do anything. But thankfully the taxi driver next to me had the sense, experience and hatred of pedestrians to first beep his horn and then lean out of the window and shout, "Get out of the fucking road, bitch!"

That fixed my mood and, although I got cut up a couple more times before I got home and an old man parked his bike diagonally in front of me at a crossing so I couldn't get past without lifting myself first onto the pavement and off again, it was a decent enough cycle ride home.

So I leave you with this thought of bus travel from an experience last year instead:
 If 2 buses have driven past you, full of people, without stopping and made you late for work, please try not to harangue the bus driver who does stop to let you on for 15 minutes and make the rest of us late for work too. You'll only eventually get thrown off the bus and waste more of your own time.

P.S. This post certainly will set a precedent in sentence length and incoherence. Read carefully.

An Introduction

As I write this post, I am sitting in the living room of my flat watching the sun set over Hammersmith bridge, still wondering whether it was actually a good idea to start this blog. 

It was a typical Tuesday afternoon, when Cassar rode in from work. Like many Londoners, he is a cyclists. And Like most of the cyclists I know, the first thing he does when he gets off the road is complain about all the people who were on it.
And it was on this Tuesday afternoon (literally, just now) that he decided that he wanted to turn his impotent rage into something productive.
If I were a Jazz musician, I would have told him to take that fire in his belly and turn it into music. If I were vaguely athletic, I would probably have told him to put that energy into training. I am none of those things. I am far too lazy. I am a "blogger".
This blog is the result. It should hopefully allow for his rage to be released in small harmless doses, for the enjoyment of the internet reading public.

yrs

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