The things people do on a pavement.

There are pros and cons to having a room at the front of this house. Surprisingly the main advantage and disadvantge are one and the same thing: that if someone wants to stop for a rest, 99.9% of the time it's right outside my window.
Maybe there's some kind of force field that attracts people to the lamp post in front of this desk, maybe it's purely by chance, or maybe they know they might be featured in this little write-up, but whatever the reason I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that the weirdest characters in Cardiff congregate outside my bedroom.

To illustrate my point, I'd like to introduce you to three of the characters who've loitered a couple of feet away from me in the last 24 hours, completely oblivious to my observation.

1. The man with the jacket.
I'm quite fond of the road we live on, but there's really nothing all that special about it. There's certainly no reason I can think of to walk up and down it all day, which is what jacket-man and his girlfriend have spent their Sunday doing. Several times today, a man with an exceptionally nice jacket (comfy-looking and black with three 'sergeant' chevrons embroidered on the shoulders) has stopped outside my window. Once, to light a cigarette, a second time to take a phone call, and a third to have an argument with the girl. None of these things are at all out of the ordinary, but why stop outside this house every time?

2. The man with the take-away down his trousers.
What do you do when you visit the take-away, and they give you two paper bags to carry home?
My first thought would be to carry one bag in each hand, or alternatively, place both packets into a carrier bag of some description.
Not so for one man who chose to rearrange his shopping outside my window. This particular man chose to grip one bag in his teeth, so as to use his free hand to adjust his Daz-white vertical cap, before taking the other bag of food, pulling out the back of his perfectly ironed Adidas trousers, placing the bag inside the back of his trousers, pulling the Reebok hoody down over the odd-looking bulge, removing the other bag from his teeth, spitting on the pavement and sauntering off to wherever one heads to with a carton of chow mein down one's trousers.

3. The lady who fired her toddler from the pushchair.
Okay, so technically this one was yesterday, but I thought she was worth a mention. Now, I'm not a parent, so maybe I shouldn't judge, but I've had a bit of experience controlling unruly shopping trolleys, go-karts and those fun, wheely things that stand in the corner of the gym at school holding the crash mats. I therefore find it hard to believe that directing a pushchair seating one sleeping toddler can be that much of a challenge. The only explanation I can find for this lady completely losing control of the pushchair so that it rolled off the pavement and catapulted her two-year old into the road is the fact that she was trying to smoke, eat a cornish pasty, hold a phone conversation and shout at a startled looking teenager on the other side of the road at the same time. Maybe they had a point when they took that lady to court for eating an apple at the wheel a while back...

Of course, there are people stopping for various reasons all day, every day, but to list them all would be to get even less work done, and the oddities of Cardiff have already left me with over a thousand words to write before the morning comes.

As a final note for tonight, I'd like to present the award for 'Weekly Weirdo' to the man who stopped to ask my housemate and his girlfriend if they use the same conditioner. I suppose someone has to wonder these things!