Miss Adventures at London Fashion Weekend...

Miss Adventures among the Wild Beasts of London

Ducks queue patiently for the London Eye.

A leopard awaits its prey near the French Institute, South Kensington.

Miss Adventures in Soho in the Rain

I hate the rain. Everyone in Britain hates the rain, except snails and that evil, joyless kind of person who starts getting excited about Christmas in June. It rains nearly all the time in this country, which is why we are all depressed alcoholics. But just over a week ago, a miracle occurred. The sun shone. Then it shone the next day, and the next, and the streets were full of heat shimmering off the pavement and tables outside cafes and pretty summer dresses and life was a precious, marvellous thing.  

Now it's gone back to rain again. 

Apparently four out of ten of all seats at the Olympic Stadium are uncovered. Ha! Take that, foreign tourists!

But sometimes, even in the rain, there are rare moments of beauty in London. A few weeks ago, wading through puddles in Soho, I heard jazz drifting towards me from across the square - long, nonchalant, melancholy notes falling from a piano somewhere - and suddenly I was no longer a gloomy Londoner but a girl in an imaginary Godard movie, wandering through a black-and-white square, the world shining under my heels and my own soundtrack trailing after me like smoke from a cigarette.

The music wasn't coming from the film score composer in the sky, but from a real piano in the corner of Soho Square. It was surrounded by people, one of whom was drinking a pint of Guinness. These pianos were placed in various spots all around the city for anyone who fancied playing some tunes for the random people around them.

I also discovered a teleporter. Like most forms of transport in London, it didn't work properly.

If you decide to visit Soho Square tomorrow or the day after, the piano and the teleporter will be gone. All that will be left is the rain. If I were a kind and thoughtful blogger I would have told you about them before, but I was too busy sunbathing.

Miss Adventures in Dark Matter

I'm still ill and am going stir crazy. Last night in bed at 3 in the morning, idly thinking about writing a facebook status along the lines of that I was finally able to eat and so would not starve to death and be found a month later being nibbled at by mice, squirrels, zebra etc., I found the following thoughts mounting in my head with increasing urgency:

What is the plural of zebra?
If the plural of zebra is also zebra (it is. I checked) then what is the plural of antelope? And wildebeest?
Do all savannah animals run around in gangs with no 's' on the end? Except, like, giraffes? And hippopotamii?
Is it hippopotamii or hippopotamuses?
Do any of those animals actually live in a savannah?
What the fuck is a savannah, anyway?

Today I finished reading a book about a girl called Isabel who travels from her new home in Turkey to her home village in Yorkshire to find out exactly what caused her friend's disappearance years ago when they were teenagers, only to discover that she, Isabel, is in fact dead/a fictional character dreamed up by her mad aunt Maggie/a combination of the two (we never find out which, because the plot is so flimsy it might as well have been cobbled together by monkeys).

I also read on facebook that the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider think that they may have found the Higgs-Boson. I followed the link, thinking: 'This is a very important discovery and I should take time out of my busy day of languishing around like a Victorian consumptive to find out more about it'. I patiently read it through, trying to extricate meaning from impenetrable sentences such as: 'the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic' (Yep. I know exactly what you're saying) and worried a little at the fact that one of the scientists described themselves as being 'super-proud' (I don't know, you'd kind of hope that someone who was meddling with the stuff of the universe would sound less like an American cheerleader) but then my eyes landed on a genuinely disturbing sentence:

'All the matter we can see appears to comprise just 4% of the universe, the rest being made up of mysterious dark matter and dark energy.'

Suddenly my bedroom, my hand on the door latch, the hallway, the street outside looked terrifyingly unreal. The Turkish men who hang around outside the shop next door 24/7 stood about like Lego figures. My mind spiralled off into the kind of questions you ask yourself at 2am when you're a student and getting stoned with your housemates: How unlikely is the universe? How unlikely is it that any of us exist at all? What if we're all dead? What if we're all fictional characters dreamed up by Isabel's mad aunt Maggie?

Because of the zebra and dark matter, I've decided to go to work tomorrow.

Miss Adventures in Malady

I have a fever. At the moment the paracetamol are working, but the last time they wore off I heard mechanical dogs barking in my head every time I blinked. All my housemates are out having fun at a party that I'm supposed to be at, except for the Indian man opposite, who has locked his door for the first time ever, possibly because he heard me moaning to myself like a phantom. There is nothing to cheer me up except an almost-finished box of Baileys chocolates and one of those horrible bottles of Italian wine that off-licences buy for 20p and sell off for £3.99, which I bought when I was drunk.

I moved in two weeks ago with just a suitcase. None of the things in the suitcase (pretty dresses! My new shoes! A motley selection of 'Teach Yourself French' coursebooks and a giant Yoga book, the combined weight of which was like dragging around a corpse!) are of any use in this situation. I have no television or DVD player, which means I can't watch 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' for the hundredth time. The only MP3 player I have with me plays the same twenty songs on a loop until you lose your mind.

This means that I've spent the whole day marooned on my bed in the middle of my enormous, empty room like a shipwreck survivor, shivering and reading the books I bought from a second-hand bookshop the other day. It's six o'clock and so far I've read two. One was 'Hotel du Lac', which was about some wilted woman mooning around in Switzerland. It was depressing. The other was a vaguely porno book about a schoolgirl who is seduced by her sadistic pervert of an English teacher who ends up keeping her in his house as his sex slave. That was pretty depressing as well. I so wish I'd bought the moronic book about the woman who goes to Italy, has an affair with a totally normal man and eats lots of pasta.

I realise that this isn't a very exciting first blog entry. Yesterday I got locked into the school I work at for nearly an hour by the evil, psychopathic caretaker, set off all the alarms in a blind panic, hung out of the window pleading with passers-by for help in manner of Fay Wray and in order to escape had to clamber out onto the edge and leap to the ground whilst accidentally flashing my knickers at a pissed-off policeman. But I didn't have a blog yesterday, and besides, that now seems like aeons ago.

It's like a sci-fi comic story I once read when I was a kid about a plane that crashes on an island peopled by weirdos in top hats, canes and funny moustaches, and the only thing there is to eat on the island is some strange seaweed. When our plane crash survivors manage to get back to New York a month or so later, it is full of flying cars and buildings that look like space hoppers.

My illness is just like that seaweed, only in reverse.