Jen Mia Mondo

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"You're gonna be a bad mothercrusher."
- Dialogue from "Robocop", as broadcast on British TV.

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More delays, more stupid letters from bureaucrats, more computers to mend...and then mend again when they crashed after the first time. But there's a plane ticket with my name on it for Sofia. I leave Monday.

Or rather, I leave around 3am on what for most people is Sunday night, take a series of trains to Gatwick Airport, stand around for three hours, and spend another three hours getting cramp in the air.

And then take a two hour train journey to the school. Which is when the actual work starts.

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The end of the world is nigh. Absolutely right nigh.

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I was meant to meet C today, but something must have gone wrong - he hadn't been in contact and his phone seems to no longer exist. I'm a bit worried but there's not much I can do. In the meantime, I spent a happy 45 minutes in the shopping precinct, just in case he turned up.

Happy but puzzled by what was going on around me.

There was a red double decker buss draped with a message about a music festival, and next to that an off-white removals van belonging to the "Solent Dog Performance Team". Near the former a young man sang pop songs of the last fifty years (and some jazz standards) to backing tapes, flanked by a clown with a sockpuppet monkey and a half dozen people dressed for the office.

The style was "easy listening" - so easy as to be unlistenable. The musical equivalent of water that someone's boiled for a couple of months just to remove all troublesome flavour.

Outside the van mingled twenty middle aged men and women in identical blue track suits, half with dogs of various small breeds. Circling around were four cheerful types dressed as a highwayman and three peasants, handing out leaflets, all in whiteface, one spattered with stage blood. They seemed to know the dog owners, and I wondered whether there was an obscure connection between dog agility tests and...seventeenth century zombies. If that's what they were.

There were the usual youngsters in logoed jackets, collecting for one charity or another, all schooled to adopt identical faux-friendly attitudes. The manner is so ubiquitous and uniform now that it's ceased even to be an annoyance and become part of the background - it stopped being successful I'd say three years ago. One collector was teaching himself to whirl his empty clipboard on his index finger, like a fancy 1920s waiter with a tray of drinks.

A newspaper stand blurted today's slightly desperate local headline: Gran Gets Email Death Threat. And around it, groups of teenagers in low slung drainpipe jeans and antifascist badges shared ipods.

Standing in the middle of it all, glaring disapprovingly in the one direction with no people in it, a pretend-policewoman took notes furiously. "Special Officers" they're called - members of the public who get no training, no pay, no powers and no respect, but they do get a uniform that looks a bit like a police outfit, and a remit to stand around looking policey. Some of them misunderstand their role and try to "fight crime", before the relentless ridicule gets them housetrained,

This scene will be my last memory for a while of what Portsmouth grandly calls it's "city centre".

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Anyway, I'm nearly gone.

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