every little old lady helps

Doubtlessly anticipating the frightening antics of the typical bus driver either round the downhill-uphill-downhill corner from Rodney Street to Broughton Road or the downhill twistyness through Canonmills towards Inverleith Row, an old woman comforts her nervous shopping after what must have been an equally stressful shopping experience. Fortunately I avoided it whilst our friends shopped as I had to stand outside to hold Nicky's bag whilst Nicky held her friend's dog's lead to which the dog was attached. It didn't seem to be able to understand that it was attached to a plastic handle by a piece of string and wasn't going to be able to wander wither it would, especially not when this coincided with the direction in which my bare lower legs lay. Wind, rain, hail, snow... fine. Dogspittle is an altogether fouler substance. Thankfully the owner was not too long in their shopping and soon emerged to reclaim her dog so that Nicky could reclaim her bag so that I could reclaim my hands-in-pockets slouch and so that everyone could walk round the corner to the bus stop whereupon I opted to walk to the destinationpub and beat the bus over the two-mile distance by five clear minutes, saving an whole pound and getting a picture of some street furniture and a tube on the way.

Unfortunately the pub had television screens which were displaying some sort of team game which elicited many moans, shrieks and gasps from the clientèle. Equally unfortunately the only things drowning them out were the horrible 1971-1988 selections on the jukebox and the baying of the crowd whose components selected them. Strangely for a pub the staff didn't keep tweaking up the music volume in the traditional positive feedback loop usually exhibited in pubs. It still wasn't very nice though; I couldn't make out what people were saying over the noise, was too brightly-lit to be able to get away with taking any pictures of the surrounding drinkers and was starting to dislike the think/sight/sound-clouding beer-effect after a couple of sips of the second pint (which was probably my second pint since new year now that I consider it) but the coffee in that particular pub doesn't even pretend to be proper coffee and comes out of a machine with "Nescafé" on the side, the orange juice comes out of warm and unrefrigerated cartons and the fizzy things are fizzy things and are best avoided.

A reasonable day, overall: ring collected from the shop and is suitably unshiny, dull and fitting; early-morning walk in the nice cold air; picture found for work photo club competition; last night's meal finally processed leaving my stomach free again and no cinéma but we watched Family Guy: Blue Harvest and were duly pleased.

And I'm managing to get this posted on the same date as the EXIF info. Nightynight.