I’m on the bus again and I miss a photo: man in shop doorway, the top half of his body concealed, jeans, white trainers, foot slowly tapping, and the sign in the window that says: SHOP OPEN 24 HOURS.

Then another shop window, a big advert offering various training courses for nurses, care workers etc.

anaging challenging behavior

dult abuse

ealth and safety in the work place

upported housing

hild safety   etc etc.

In the afternoon I went to St Anne’s for my pre-operative assessment (for my postponed cataract operation.) A lot of questions. Have I had mad cow disease. And, later, have I ever been told I have mad cow disease. I answer ‘no’ to so many questions I begin to feel healthy. The record of my ECG shows my heart ticking over nicely. Then the nurses says she has to measure my BMI. That’s body mass index. I said, ‘they never did that before.’ She said, ‘they think of something new every day.’ I’d already curiously stood on the scales – 59 kilos. Then I did it again so she could see. Then we walked around the hospital looking for the thing that measures your height. It had been moved. She found it in the end. 174 centimetres. It’s a new experience, being 174 centimetres, because of course I was always Imperial before. Then we go to a computer, but three websites fail to translate the two numbers into my BMI. What do you expect from Google. She enters the figures, presses SUBMIT, and nothing happens. I always submit, but it doesn’t help. I pointed out that I couldn’t be 174 feet high, and she corrected that, but it still didn’t work. Back home, I tried myself, and it did work, and I’m not too thin.  But I see from the table that puts in imperial numbers automatically alongside the metric ones that I’ve shrunk, or she didn’t measure me properly, so 174 centimetres no longer seems very tall.

Too tired to write anything interesting now – it’s the weeding, but just to let you know, I’m dong three talks and walks as part of the Chelsea Fringe. Details on chelseafringe.com – go to central london then self seeders walk: can self seeding natives and aliens create new communities? Lots of interesting questions but mostly a chance to discover some interesting gardens.

The first walk was to have been this friday, but when I finally went through the stack of junk mail last week I found a four week old letter from the hospital telling me my operation had been postponed from last friday to this friday so I had to rearrange things.