Today I went for a blood test, I now have plasters in three places. It was apparently something to do with checking blood sugar levels. It’s a nightmare getting older, you spend your whole life trying to prevent the inevitable as you physically lose the ability to prevent the inevitable, whilst waving goodbye, helpless to what was second nature for decades. You don’t even think about it all till later in the story because if you are lucky enough, everything works for years, and then…I’m begging for my brain to keep working, haha. I’m hoping that my music obsession is going to keep all the electrical impulses firing, working on the theory that every time I listen to a record, the length of that record is how much longer I’m going to live than I would have if I hadn’t listened. So at this point, I will be living until I’m 177.

We had to be at the lab with all the paperwork before 11 AM because for some reason they don’t do blood tests after that time. It was really quiet, quieter than I’ve ever seen it. I asked the girl who took the blood sample why it was so quiet and she said that this week all the doctors had decided to go on holiday. It sounded like an odd explanation, but she was serious. So for once in our lives we were out before 11 AM, so we decided to take advantage of the fact and went to have breakfast out (another reason was that I hadn’t eaten pre blood test). As soon as we headed deeper into the city, the wind began to howl and the rain poured down. We took refuge in the old station, but as soon as we found shelter it started to clear up. We dodged the puddles in the street and headed to a café Olivia knew that I hadn’t been to before.

We were deep in tourist territory despite the weather and in the café, we sat between two American women and a Spanish couple. He had a really annoying voice that seemed to cut through everything and stood out so much that the bottles on the shelf behind us began to shake. It was one of those quick-fire machine gun Spanish deliveries that entwined itself with our words, interrupted our sentences, and added Spanish words into our Swedish and English sentences. The only way out was to start using my few German phrases and it was then that we noticed that the couple behind us were German. After ordering in Portuguese and Spanish, eating a nice breakfast, and heading out, I realised we had left piles of languages all mixed up on the table.

We walked, rain-free but puddle-aware to the record store but nothing was in for me. I found three cheap CDs, Iggy Pop – Soldier (1980) and Party (1981) and Nilsson Schmilsson (1971). We were opposite the main Millennium bank and it reminded Olivia that we had a small US royalty check to deposit and we could only do it there, so she went home to get it. It was for 70 bucks and the hour we had to wait to deposit it was only just worth it. But whilst there, we met BJ and his partner. He was from Detroit, she was from Budapest but spoke German and lived in South Tyrol – languages were spilling all over the place again.

Later it was dinner and the mad Spurs/Chelsea game (1-4). Five disallowed goals, two Spurs players sent off, injuries and subs, only four of the Spurs starting eleven were on the pitch at the end. Great entertainment.