The Cultural Melting Pot that is the Costa in Putney

Alfonso, the unfortunate, simple looking Venezuelan with a nasty limp and equally nasty “ethnic” facial hair: “Yes guv’nor”

Me: “Medium black Americano please”

Alfonso, directing an unusual amount of anger at his Polish colleague, Agneszka: “Americano, now. Do it please”

Agneszka: “You do it, I do last one. You are a rude boy.”

“I am a Venezuelan gentleman, I am not rude”

“You are very rude”

“You are very wrong”

“You think you were in Backstreet Boys group.” Nice insult, I thought.

“Not again”

“Yes”

“No”

“Yes”

And so on for about a minute. Enter Jaroslav, the Slovak supervisor.

“Alfonso, Agneszka, not in front of the customer”

“We are not arguing, we are friends” argued Agneszka.

“Not true; she said I’m a backstreet boy.”

“You are!” laughed Jaroslav, cracking up, “Venezuelan backstreet boy, ha ha!”

“I’ll have my lunch break now.” Alfonso knew when he was beaten by the better man/woman.

And to top it all off, they gave me a large black Americano for no extra charge. As I walked to my seat I’m sure I saw the two Eastern Europeans high-five. Turns out it’s not just the Eurovision song contest where they stick together.

The black basketball player within me

Get me. It’s only taken a couple of hours of practice but now I am able to stand on a swiss ball. My core stability rocks. I knew I could kneel on it and do lateral shoulder raises, but hell yeah, now I can stand, albeit for short periods of time.

At 13h40 this afternoon I would have never thought it possible that my core would stand it. I’d only just mastered bicep curling in a kneeling position. I look back at that point around lunchtime where that would have satisfied me with pity. Talk about a lack of ambition. Perhaps it was something in neighbours that inspired me to go the extra yard. Perhaps it was Lou finally getting over his fear of flying that made me believe that I too could confront my fears. Perhaps it was Lolly deciding she would stand up to her stepmother who had been slapping her about a bit. Whatever it was, it allowed me to break free from my self-imposed swiss ball related shackles and reach deep into my soul.

At first it wasn’t easy. My footing was all over the place. As Doctors reached its dramatic conclusion I was managing a good ten seconds. Thinking about all the motivational speeches I have heard from films over the last 27 ½ years I could feel a foreign energy in the room every time I gingerly let go of the wall and journeyed into the unknown. I was pushing the limits of my core stability. For one afternoon I came to understand the feeling that 18th century gold rush pioneers must have felt as they travelled across the vast plains towards a new life. In the same way their existences were fraught with danger, I was all too aware that a small slip in concentration could have brought me crashing down onto the mattress I had positioned nearby.

As a toddler eventually sheds their stabilisers as they learn to ride a bike for the first time, the mattress was re-stowed under my bed - I felt as free as a bird. As the episode of Peep Show I was watching ended at 15h15, I knew time was against me; I was using all my physical and mental capacity to master this trickiest of core stability related goals so once Countdown began at 15h30 I would have to stop. It was now or never (or after Countdown I suppose).

The first time I withdrew my hands from the wall and placed them in a funereal pose across my chest I could feel the result of the 1h25mins’ practice. It was like my hard work was being rewarded at last. That was my Waterloo; with the Napoleonic swiss ball back in the corner of the room it was time to return to Apsley House and become prime minister of my sofa in front of Countdown.

You can't call me, Al.

Weds May 9th, 17h42. Neighbours is on. I’m watching it. With interest given the amount of lesbian action it has featured of late. The last thing you want is the phone to ring, but hey, it might be important.

“Good evening sir, how are you this evening?”

“Fine”

“Just to let you know, my name’s Alan. How was your bank holiday weekend?”

“Fine”

“That’s great, hope it was good, you didn’t drink too much? I know I did, ha ha ha, I always do!”

Twat.

“No, I don’t drink. I’m a Muslim.”

“Oh that’s great - just want to let you know, I’m not trying to sell you anything - just a friendly call to see if you’ve heard of the Hertz Foundation?”

“No.”

“Ha ha ha, good that’s means we’re doing our job right!!”

Twat.

“Can you tell me if you gamble a lot - playing the lottery, that sort of thing?”

“No. The Qur’an forbids it.”

“Well ok, what it is, is that I’m just wondering if you’d be interested in playing the British Heart Foundation Lottery - buying a few tickets? It benefits a lot of good causes and you could win up to £1,000!!”

Twat.

“No thanks. I said I don’t gamble”

“Ha ha ha, that’s great sir, well while I’ve got you on the line…”

I hung up. If someone can make me think “twat” three times in such a short period of time you’ve got to wonder. Still no sign of the lesbians on Neighbours but.

Diagnosis: Murder

What a program. It has everything. That is if murders count as everything. Apparently Diagnosis: Murder (the colon appears in the official series title apparently) lasted for 178 episodes, most of which I seem to have seem over the last few weeks when I’ve been doing nothing but waiting for my exams to start before I can get a proper job. It lasted for 7 ½ years. That’s 7 ½ times as long as Eldorado.

That’s a lot of murders - it makes you think that everybody gets murdered all the time. Quite literally. But how many?

I’m no statistician but I’m fairly sure I can come up with some pretty damning evidence that everybody gets murdered all the time.

In my experience, the “murder” mentioned in the title often means “murders”. I’m assuming that there are on average 1.5 murders per program that occur, 90% of the time happening to either a friend of the Sloan family or to a patient in Mark Sloan’s hospital department. According to my reliable internet source, there are 139 hospitals in LA, each with 1,048 consultants (based on the assumption that each LA hospital employs the same number of consultants as their Northern Irish counterparts circa 2005). I also assume that each and every consultant in each and every hospital in LA gets involved with investigating as many murders as Mark Sloan.

So this gives us:
178 episodes x 1.5 murders per episode = 267 murders
90% of these to do with Dr Sloan = 240.3
240.3 / 7 ½ years = 32.04 murders a year
32.04 x 139 hospitals x 1,048 consultants = 4,667,330 suspicious murders that only a doctor (rather than, say, the police) are able to solve in in LA per year.

The population of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area is 12,923,548. That means that every year, approximately 1 in every 2.77 residents of Los Angeles fall prey to a murderer who could have got away with it were it not for a team of highly trained doctors choosing not to spend their time on their patients, instead of which opting to dedicate hours of their time to helping the police.

That’s shit loads. Even if the murder rate in Britain is half that, it still means more than 18% of us will be done in by some crazed lunatic (but obviously not by the obvious crazed lunatic we all assumed did it; rather the younger jealous brother / the disgruntled business associate / the doctor in Community General who strangely appeared at the beginning of one episode but who it turns out had a connection to you, the victim, twenty or more years ago).

So there - be careful.

How not to be nice

Having spent last weekend at home in sunny Nottinghamshire to attend Perkins’ “Goodbye, I’m moving to Florida shindig” and seen the abundance of people who turned out to bid him farewell I realised that if I moved to Florida, the turnout for my “Goodbye, I’m moving to Florida too” shindig would be considerably lower. I wouldn’t even be able to count on Perkins’ attendance given he’d already be in Florida.

“Well you don’t come across at first as being very nice,” said mum the next day. Alice nodded in agreement.

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it Mark,” added dad, assuming that by avoiding answering the question all would be well. Great.

Given that Alice and I are thinking of moving to Switzerland later this year I decided that I need to be nicer. At the moment I can count on the fingers of two hands the people who would turn up and that’s nowhere near enough people buying me a free drink to send me on my way.

I decided to start by smiling more. Indiscriminately so. As I was sat on the tube I tried it but accidentally caught the eye of a girl opposite who clearly thought I was a newly released sex offender and switched seats. Then carriages. Then I’m sure I saw her getting off the train and waiting on the platform for the next one. Perhaps smiling isn’t for me.

Then in the afternoon I went to the running track. Usually I’m fairly single-minded whilst doing a track workout and get fairly pissed off with anyone else even being near the track. Not anymore I decided. I turned up and saw a load of kids in some sort of youth group using a bit of the track - usually I’d just run straight through them. Instead I asked the receptionist if the track was open (knowing full-well it was - good turn #1). He said yes. Then I asked if I’d be getting in the way of the kids playing (they weren’t even using the track for its proper purpose - definitely good turn #2). No he said, he’d ask them to move. He reliably assured me it’d be no problem whatsoever. Excellent.

Doing up my shoes sat on the outside of the track, the youth group leader approached me.

“How much space do you need?”

“Not a lot, just one lane” (there were seven others after all).

“Suppose that’s ok. But you should just watch out when you run past us.”

He said what? I only wanted one fucking lane. Shouldn’t he be watching them? I’m no lawyer but I’m fairly sure that if I ran into a kid straying into my lane it’d be his fault, not mine. I was getting pretty pissed off with this.

“Yeah, I suppose,” I said pretty nonchalantly. After all, it wasn’t like they couldn’t be controlled because they were mentally disabled or anything.

“Well they are mentally disabled,” the youth group leader pointed out. Bollocks. He was right as well. “I’ll try but they are pretty excited this afternoon as it’s the only time they get to do any exercise all month.”

Shit, me being nice was going out of the window. It’s not like I’m going to invite any of these kids to my “Goodbye I’m moving to Switzerland” shindig so technically my inadvertent bastard-like actions wouldn‘t have any effect on turnout, but still. One of the kids even apologised to me for being in the way (when he wasn‘t). I felt like a right fucker.

Nonetheless I’m still going to try and be nice. But probably not by smiling or trying to be nice to disadvantaged youngsters. That’ll never work.