Leicester

Train rolling into Market Harborough. A mobile phone crowing like a cockerel. Young slick-haired man in business suit answers.

Doubts about self. Fearing I look too raggedy to belong outside of my own town, my streets. "Who is that tramp sitting on our train writing trampy nonsense in a little red notebook?"
The mind is such a persecutor.

When the driver announces a delay due to signalling problems near Kegworth, two-thirds of the passengers in my carriage simultaneously whip out mobile phones and send messages to those who are expecting them in Leicester.

Home of Joe Orton!
Colin Wilson!
Sue Townsend!(?)
(The law of diminishing returns perfectly illustrated.)

I tried to read "Adrian Mole", on Ruth's recommendation--she saw a similarity between Adrian's bohemian pretensions and mine--but I thought it was a dull, unfunny, obvious, middle-brow book.

Fat woman running down the road to catch a bus looks like a blancmange sliding down a table with a short leg.

I go into Help The Aged to look for books and find one I've not seen before by Joe Orton.
When I take it to the counter the old lady at the till looks the book over, front and back, and says:
"Orton? Where do I know that name?"
"He was a famous playwright from Leicester," I say.
"Oh, I wouldn't know," she says. "I wasn't born locally."
"Neither was I," I say, instantly wondering if I sound pettish.
But she doesn't notice. She is lost in an old-lady world that looks rather pleasant. When she gives me my change, she keeps hold of the 50 pence after she has placed it in my palm and looks me in the eyes with a strangely flirtatious grin. (She is about ninety.) It is only when I relent and smile back that she releases the money.

She could be a Beryl Reid character in a Joe Orton play about an innocent youth encountering weird goings-on when he arrives in the big city.

(from the author's journal.)