Dada

On the way back from looking at a house that Lenin had once lived in, we saw a Dada house, or at least a house in which, according to a plaque, the spirit of Dada had been revived in 2002. Two young men smoking at a window upstairs for our camera. Downstairs, the skin of a black and white cat on a wall.

Sweeter and sweeter

She explained that the substitute sugar in artificially sweetened drinks and lollies not only passed through the body intact, but also through the sewerage processors – which meant, as she said, that our water was getting sweeter and sweeter – all the water on the planet becoming sweeter and sweeter; an idea that not only turned our stomachs but depressed us all quite a lot.

Cut

Yesterday, on my way to the station – to a concert, as it happened, of Brazilian percussionists – a woman walked out from the hairdressers a few paces in front of me – from under a roller door that had been partly pulled down – it was nearly six, I remember, the hairdressers were closing. She stopped for a moment and put her hand to her throat. Her hair was wet, I noticed, and newly cut.

Wireless

We learned that fast wireless networking was invented by an Australian astronomer who was on the look out for mini black holes in space and that the astronomer never found those mini black holes.

Roundabout

As I was crossing right over the top of the roundabout in the middle of the intersection, a woman with orange make-up approached to say, can I ask you something? At my awkward reply that, yes she could ask me, but I had to be somewhere quickly, she turned aside to speak to herself: nah, I’m not going to say something quickly. I’m not saying something quickly to you.

A similar storm

On Wednesday, the day of the dust storm, the woman in the café told us that, after waking to see the city had turned orange, she'd rung her sister to discuss how, fifty years earlier, they had watched red sand pile on the seats and tables outside their house during a similar storm in Palermo – a house which, I imagined, was attached to the back of a café, just as her own place here was attached to the back of a café.

She had her grandchild with her. The child was restless. The day was paler outside now – yellow, opaque – and the child was watching ten minutes of one show and then a few minutes of another on a large television screen at the back of the shop.

Two distinct advantages

I listened with interest as the large middle-aged man sitting at the very front of the bus began a conversation with the elderly man next to him.

This man began by asking his neighbour where he was planning to get off and then, leaning back against the window and turning to face him, the larger man declared that the best seats in the bus were at the front and at the very back of the bus. The seats at the front and the back of the bus were far less likely to be taken, he was saying. There wasn’t much between them, although the seats at the back of the bus had two distinct advantages: first, you usually had the whole seat to yourself and second, you didn’t have to give up your seat to frail or less mobile people.

Since I got out of the bus at the same stop that the elderly neighbour did, I had the chance to wonder whether the man’s unsteady but rapid strides in his impeccably clean pale blue jeans had been influenced in any way by the observations of the middle-aged man he had left behind.