We don't call that walking

The whole time we were walking behind the man whose posture was so upright that he walked on his toes -- his bunched calves pulling his springing heels high -- we wanted to tell him to walk properly, to make his heels touch the ground. We even wanted to lay our hands on his head and press him to the footpath so he might be able to walk like us -- although we knew that, in order to do this, we needed to place ourselves higher. The rust-bottomed fridge lying flat on its front in Chalder Street was perfect for this kind of leverage. Your tennisy outfit doesn't fool us. You look ridiculous. Your way of walking is obviously a joke -- or is it that you're ignorant of the normal methods of locomotion, in which case your way of walking is making us anxious. Who are you trying to impress with your toe tip stepping? What on earth do you think you are doing? Walking? We don't call that walking. We just had to lure him into the backstreets off Salisbury Road to release these thoughts.

Writing the treatise

Although I actually said: every time I pick up Gitta Honegger's biography of Thomas Bernhard, a mosquito circles around me, trying to bite my hands, she thought I had said Thomas a Becket, and from this evolved an entirely different conversation from the one I might have had about this writer that nobody around me has read -- or entomology, of course, since mosquitoes have formed the one long plague of these past several weeks, and to think otherwise, as I harangued her later, you would have to have been living in a fridge or the very interior of an abandoned lime works, merrily writing the treatise your companion, at the point of homicidal mania, has been trying to write for years.