The Great Unknown

After two weeks residing in my pyjamas, when the closest I have been to real life is the Aussie soaps (I've taken to wandering around the house wailing dramatically in my best Madge Bishop voice) I have reached that stage of writing where I am so entrenched in a world of my own invention that my sister coming home in the evening is a traumatic event. She will, perfectly reasonably given that she lives here, wander into the kitchen and I will jump three feet in the air and scream in terror, so bizarre is it to hear a voice that isn't in my own head. It would be fair to say that she finds it somewhat irritating.

This afternoon, I realized that I had run out of an essential ingredient to the elixir of life that keeps me going - milk for my intravenous drip of tea - so rather than doing something intelligent like go to the supermarket and buy milk, I happily wandered up to Café Nero for a cup of tea.

So shocked was I to emerge blinking and trembling a little into the bright lights big city of Earls Court that I'd walked halfway up the road before I noticed that I didn't have my glasses on. I wear contacts most of the time, but when dressing myself in anything other than a sweats over pyjamas (apparently layers are in this year) might as well be black tie, sticking my fingers in my eye to attach spectacles to my eyeball is a surge of activity unlikely to happen.

Eyeing the distance to the coffee shop and the distance back to my flat, I decided that I was slightly more than halfway so - in the interests of returning promptly to work, naturally - I decided that I didn't really need to see in order to procure a cup of tea, so I might as well carry on. Despite tripping over a dog lead, walking into a display of muffins and spilling half the tea down my front (which, to be fair, I often do whether I can see or not) I thought that my mission had been something of a success.

So much of a success in fact, that by the time I had finished, I had forgotten that I wasn't wearing my glasses but had remembered that I wanted to wander to Robert Dyas to look at some blenders - so I decided that there was no time like the present and trotted off down Kensington High Street. Even wondering why I seemed to have trampled more tourists than usual didn't remind me of my sightless state, so it wasn't until I got to Robert Dyas and couldn't find the blenders that I was reminded I was in a pickle. I wandered around for a bit, peering in vain at small white goods and was afraid to ask a staff member where they were in case I was standing right next to them.