Good afternoon Negative Soundbyters! I am sitting quietly in our kitchen drinking a coffee and tapping away on my laptop with the Open on in the background. Peace prevails. For the time being that is.
Baba Hodson is still refusing to grace us with his presence; to be fair he still has a week left until the official due date so why hurry? If he knew The Donald was out there he would be prolonging his stay in the womb as long as possible!
One thing he is sure to be proud of when he comes into this world is his nursery. It is proper. No proverbial stone has been left unturned. Mrs H has created a baba paradise; perfect paint and curtain match; clothes hung in age, season and colour profile (I still can’t find my green baba one-sie that I bought him from Sainsburys!); all sheets neatly pressed and enough blankets at the ready to keep an Eskimo warm in an Arctic winter; a station set up to take care of all sorts of nappy episodes (something which my friends who are fathers love telling me about); monitoring devices installed so that when he is old enough to try and climb out of his cot Big Brother will instruct him to come to the Diary Room for a dressing down (knowing our son he might just pull a zap at the camera and make a beeline for the stairs!) and last and by no means least, a series of animal pictures hung along one of the walls.
Thus far my contribution to said paradise had been to hang the curtain rail (which slopes ever so slightly to the right) and to assist with the erection of the snuzz pod. These pictures were the last piece of the puzzle. I retrieved my spirit level, pencil, ruler and hammer from the basement in readiness for the installation. Tool check complete. Now to the discussion about placement. Mrs H wasn’t really in the mood to debate where the rhino was to be positioned relative to the lion; just that Baba H be able to see them. Jokingly I placed one at knee level. That was going to land one of two ways; with a massive arched eyebrow or a laugh. To Mrs H’s credit she smiled but only for about a nanosecond; she didn’t want to prolong this any longer than was necessary. I got to work as instructed and soon we had the Big Four watching out over Baba H’s domain – mostly in a straight line!
All he need now do is arrive. I am not sure we could be any more prepared. Emotionally it is likely to be a roller coaster and not every eventuality can be planned for (when it comes to a little baba) but Mrs H has certainly ensured that he will not want for anything from Day 1! Incidentally Mrs H told me the other day that she was experiencing a phenomenon known as “lightening vagina”. It sounded like something a superhero might experience in a porn movie, but I was assured that it was all pregnancy related. I wondered momentarily what the male equivalent of this might be….”thunder bolt”?
Okay Hoddy let’s move away from the weather to an anecdote.
Big Love to you all.
X
The City.
I have just started a new job in The City. For all my London career I have been based in the West End; first in Mayfair and then Victoria.
The pace in the West End is measured. The people who work there do not seem hurried. Maybe it’s because of who lives there or rather the type of money that is managed there. Big family fortunes; secretive hedge funds; royal estates; the empires of oligarchs and Arabs; and Christopher Hodson. Ha Hoddy you wish! Buck Palace is in the neighbourhood; lush green and forested parks abound and there are enough luxurious hotels and fine dining establishments to throw a Rolls Royce at; not to mention the boutiques that can make a rich man poor with a few swipes of the Black American Express Centurion card!
The City on the other hand…is well….full of people in a hurry! I am convinced that everyone is trying to kill me. If you do not have all your wits about you, you will be jostled by impatient looking City-workers from the narrow pavements onto tight roads where getting side swiped by a bus, a taxi, a scooter, a white van, a motor bike or even a lycra-clad cyclist is a very real possibility. And then you throw in the errant tourist in who has lost his way to the Tower of London; it’s a disaster waiting to happen. I feel as if I need to have eyes in the back of my head – and above each ear – at times to ensure that I will survive the day! Navigating The City is not for the faint-hearted!
I have discovered an independent coffee shop for my early morning cappuccino (dry with an extra espresso shot) to calm my nerves. The barista was tinkering with the coffee machine (they hadn’t opened yet) so I waited patiently at one of the tables. The clock ticked over to seven thirty and I was given the nod. I approached the counter, just in front of a “City worker” who burst into the shop clearly expecting his order to be taken first as had most likely been the case for the many years he had been slaving away as a cubicle dweller in some nondescript office building around the corner.
I could sense his displeasure at being displaced so I placed my order very deliberately. As usual whenever I order anything I had to repeat myself a few times, especially as the barista was from Spain. “Dry? Que?” I was like “Say What?”, “Que..”, “Dry…duo shots”…”Que?”. You get the picture.
Cubicle dweller was getting so agitated that his routine had been thrown out by thirty seconds that before the Spanish service ambassador and I had exchanged our third “Que?”, he had turned tail and stormed out of the shop – with an audible “HUFF!” to go with his departure! I am not the world’s most patient guy but he had taken it to the next level. I was like “Dude, you need to chill…” I need to ensure that I get to that coffee shop before him every morning from now on! It’s Dog eat Dog in The City!
I paid for my coffee and ambled to the office. Luckily it is literally a stone’s throw away so the odds of dying are low, but I need to watch out for cubicle dweller. He is not likely to take being usurped lying down!
OUT :)
Pic of the Week
A City shot.
