On Friday night I had arranged to meet a friend at the Cork and Bottle, an unreconstructed wine bar from the 1980s in central London.  I know it’s virtually unchanged since about 1984, when I first visited; the walls have a yellow patina from the time when smoking was still permitted inside, the fairy lights around the door function only occasionally and there’s a refrigerated cabinet for the selection of cheeses.

The outside door looks so shabby that only those who know what an idiosyncratic  interior is on offer would dare to venture through; and this is very fortunate as it provides a welcome interesting venue in the sea of nastiness around Leicester Square.

The bar is in a basement, and from the street you have to descend a metal spiral staircase.  On Friday I was sitting at a table directly facing the staircase and watched each new customer arrive, feet first.  After the feet, calves and then rump, just as the spiral turned away from me, to the back of the shoulder and head, before the whole person became visible with the final turn at the bottom of the stairs.

Waiting for my friend I became fascinated by the question of whether it was possible to anticipate the look of a person’s face, by looking at their shoes and how nimbly they negotiated the stairs.

When I’m looking for a person in a crowd, I try to conjure a mental picture of them in my mind’s eye, their face, what I think they’ll be wearing, both to make sure that I don’t miss them, and to conjure them as quickly as possible.  On Friday I discovered the same trick doesn’t work at all when all I have to go on is a view of their feet.  I’ve discovered I need to see at least a whole leg.

I’ve read there are some actors who build a performance of a character from the shoes up; that they could visualise the whole person, the outfit, the gait once they had settled on the footwear.

So what do these shoes tell you about the person wearing them?

Which is the teacher, the lawyer, the painter, the beautician or the cook?

Which is blonde, brunette and red-headed?

Who is wearing make-up?  Who has painted finger nails?

Go on, make something up.

Yesterday wasn’t a good day for the PC; in fact the last week has been a series of days which weren’t that good for the laptop.  I’ve spent several hours watching that screen with the little blue bar scrolling backwards and forwards on the screen saying ‘Please wait.  Trying to repair.’

Reluctant to sit and watch helplessly, I was even less keen on walking away and leaving it.  What might it do if I wasn’t watching?  We’ve been through this awful little pantomime together twice in the last 5 days.

It’s just another addition to the list which includes constant deployment of the fan, frequent slippage of the wifi button (which is I think in a poorly designed, far too accessible spot) and an intermittent  reluctance to open iTunes, factors which indicate it’s time I start researching for a replacement.

The prospect of this fill me with deep, deep reluctance for two reasons, the first is that I’m very fond of my shiny red laptop, the second is that making a rational replacement choice, based on sensible, comprehensible advice is virtually impossible.

My base knowledge is limited.  Reading reviews on the internet opens one up to having to decide how much of a lunatic each contributor is; asking friends usually reveals that their knowledge is as limited as mine, and usually based on the style and colour of the outside; and trying to ask an IT professional merely unleashes a flood of incomprehensible jargon.

Widening the question to whether I should switch from a PC to a Mac raises even more imponderables; it’s like asking a football supporter about switching team allegiance.  People who used to have a PC but now have a Mac tend to explain their preference based on some extra function the one has over the other, and then when I investigate it seems that both systems now do it.

It reminds me of visiting a friend of my mother’s who had emigrated from Manchester to Los Angeles in the late 1940s, and from the things she said it was clear she assumed that even when we visited her in 1969 that nothing had changed in the UK; that we would never have been in a car, nor experienced central heating.

In the spirit of experimentation, yesterday I visited an Apple shop; my first ever such visit.  The most astonishing thing about the experience, apart from my not being able to get the demonstration model to work on my own, was how articulate the sales guy was: I think it might count as the first time an IT person has spoken to me in complete sentences entirely devoid of jargon.

And the laptops are all so sleek and shiny…..

It's never a good sign when you have to take a photo in this cupboard

The better the time I’ve had away, the worse  the coming back home ‘decompression’, it seems.

I drove back to London on Thursday, stopping off in the middle for a chat and a coffee with a friend (and a little detour as I go a bit lost en-rout to the rendez-vous).  It’s a drive of about 440 miles, and usually takes me about 8 hours, all in.  It’s a journey I’ve done many times, and there are sections, going across Bow Moor in Cumbria, or passing Beattock Summit where I actually enjoy it.

This time, the drive was fine, until the last 3 miles, which took me nearly an hour.  I should have known.  It’s never a good idea to use the North Circular if there’s an alternative route, and once on it I was totally trapped, and inched my way through the gridlock to home.  I was starting to lose interest in paying attention to the road, feeling totally punch drunk by the time I arrived.

I don’t really know what made me look in the central heating cupboard, but once done, there was no forgetting the water dripping through the ceiling from the upstairs flat.  Shutting the door didn’t elimintate the need to do something.

Hoping, no matter how fervently, that it would have fixed itself when I wasn’t looking, didn’t work as a strategy, so with my bags still piled in the hall, I mopped up, balanced bowls in the awkward corners under the drips and congratulated myself on not resorting to weeping.

Looking on the bright side, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the last leak in that cupboard which had led to the complete replacement of the wooden floor throughout the flat.  Everything’s relative.

And without the water ingress, I’d not have been part of the comedy skit with my neighbour on Friday morning.  The flat upstairs is rarely occupied, but thankfully the owner’s brother responded very quickly to the leak alert (probably, like me, because he lives in fear of a repeat of the disaster of the last flood).  I expect he regretted coming straight from work in his smart dark suit, and shiny, sharp, shoes.

Trying to find the source of a water leak is a very efficient bonding activity for strangers; you share war stories and allow your neighbours into your flat and into the deepest recesses of your cupboards; you compare totally uninformed untrained opinion on the reasons for the problem, and you complain about the builders.

It’s lucky that I had a torch.

The repair is still a work in progress; I’m hopeful and tolerating the banging noises from upstairs as I write, and have reduced the visits into my cupboard to check the ceiling and dripping into the cereal bowls to hourly.

Hopefully, tonight, I won’t dream about a flood again.