Power Walking through London Town

“Do you play a lot of sports?”

It was my first time at the BBC London Building. It was a pretty big deal for me, as I don’t often travel to the big smoke from my little town in South Wales. I spent a large percentage of my day searching for a green and yellow train on the Circle and District line, which disappointingly never came. All around me there seemed to be tutts and moans about the Olympics, and everywhere I looked there seemed to be a logo, a graphic, or catch-phrase that related to the games in some shape or form. It didn’t particularly bother me. I wasn’t in any way interested in sports.

This was the first time anyone had mistaken me for someone who was.

I suppressed a laugh.

“No, I don’t engage in any form of sporting activity...”

But that wasn’t strictly true.

Anyone who’s read my previous posts might recall that mine wasn’t a very conventional school (although it did have the best math teacher in the world.) I never had a detention during my five years, but that wasn’t because I followed the rules.

It was because I knew how to bend them.

For the small minority of the class who didn’t wish to partake in gym class, myself included, it was standard practise to forget your gym kit in order to be excused from the class. It wasn’t a sadist school; you didn’t have to run around in your knickers and make a mockery of yourself in order to deter other potential skivers. It was a sports competitive school and I suppose, to some extent, it merely made it easier to weed out the weaker players that might lose the game for those who took it seriously. Anyone who forgot their kit was given a standard detention and the whole thing was forgotten about until next week, where the process would repeat.

I was frequently among those sitting on the grass during gym class, but I wasn’t playing tennis. I spent my early teenage years well and truly addicted to Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries series and am adamant to this day that it was time well spent.

The first time I forgot my gym kit was a genuine mistake. There were a few gobby girls in my class who thought the teacher was going to come down hard on me, and indeed encouraged the act like some strange public hanging spectacle. I saw the teacher struggling to control the gaggle of blood thirsty girls and was ready to deal with my punishment. I was quite happy to spend my lunchtimes reading my book inside a quiet office, as opposed to a noisy canteen. I saw the teacher’s eyes rest on my book as I stood there apologetically.

“Can you tell me what lethargic means?” she asked. For a moment, my cheeky little twelve year old brain started to wonder what they paid these gym teachers for as I explained the meaning of the word to her and the rest of the uninterested class.

“You can go sit on the grass and get on with your reading.”

We were stunned.

“Oi, miss! Tha’s not fair!” mouthed a hairspray clad tangerine between mouths of chewing gum.

“Can you tell me what ambient means?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. The girl fell silent.

“I think it’s important to improve your knowledge of words.” the teacher said. “It’s how you communicate with the world. “

My eyes lit up: I couldn’t have agreed more. “Miss?” I asked, carefully treading the line of a child who had forgotten her gym kit and got off the hook but who was still trying to have a sense of humour about it, “Do you know what facetious means?”

The teacher looked at me with an expression that said she’d heard of the word, but didn’t fully know the meaning of it. “I’ll find out by next week.”

Each week my gym teacher and I played our word game. I grew up to become an adult who ran an abnormally high risk of heart disease, but a rather good scrabble player.

And so it became, from that day onwards, the only sport I would take part in for the rest of my life would be running after busses. School busses, holiday busses, Megabusses...

In some freak form of karma, my body later decided to rebel against itself and I developed the skin condition chronic urticaria and angiodema. If you don’t want to google it, I’ll summarise.

If get too hot I explode.

Or something like that. Sadly it’s a condition that is little known and the Megabus, with its broken air-con system, was no exception. It’s for that reason that I usually always have some type of mobile fan system with me, for occasions like today where I’m left sweating to death in unseasonably hot conditions. Worse still is when you are sweating to death in near desert like conditions when you discover the batteries for your portable mini fan have run out.

Cue my sole mission for the rest of the day to find batteries in London, and I do love London. It’s a city where you can blend in; become part of the crowd. People get a coffees alone. They don’t talk on tubes. They don’t run through tube stations. They don’t stand on the left hand side of the escalator, and if they want batteries, they need to bloody well need to search for them.

It very soon became my catch phrase. “I need to find batteries...”

The girl I was travelling with gave me a strange look, but mercifully joined my on my quest to find a shop that sold batteries so that I could save myself from developing elephant like features while around members of the general public.

We found them just before we sat in the coolest, darkest pub we could find, and where I remained waiting with the rest of the Production Talent Pool until the networking event we’d been invited to started, where we could meet Talent Managers and talk about potential work projects and contracts.

It turned out I didn’t the batteries after all. I bitterly disposed of them inside my handbag. I looked around the room at all the other people talking and contemplated jumping out of the fourth floor window. If there was a Networking class at school, I must have been hiding in the toilets because I suck at it. In the most obvious of ways; I find myself word vomiting the most inappropriate information.

“Hi, I’m Fat Bradley. In twenty years time my GP will announce I’m at serious risk of Type Two diabetes, nice to meet you!”

“Hi. I need batteries...”

 

I didn’t quite know how to sell myself yet, but I decided not to let that spoil what had turned out to be a pretty exciting day for me. I decided that rather than go hunting for contacts and contracts, I’d use the time to get to know people on the Pool. Everyone I spoke to seemed to come from a totally different kind of background, everyone had an interesting story to tell. I poured myself a glass of wine and got networking.

Strangely enough, lots of people seemed to pick up quite quickly that I was from Cardiff (which I’m attributing to my exceptional good looks, which can only derive from the secluded/inbred Welsh Valleys.)

“Are you from Cardiff?”

I nodded. “What gave me away?”

“You sound like Gavin and Stacey!”

Ah. I sound like Gavin and Stacey, which technically was incorrect. I didn’t sound like Gavin, only Stacey, and if we’re being honest, I sound more like Nessa, which I had already been told earlier on in the day on my battery quest.

“Fat_ Bradley, you’ve got to stop saying you need batteries out loud...” announced my exasperated travel companion as we trawled the highstreet. I shot her a queried glance. “Have you ever seen that scene from Gavin and Stacey? Where Nessa says ‘Oh, Gwen, I need batteries...”

The scene registered in my mind.

“Go on...”

“Well, that’s all you’ve said all day! I just keep seeing the scene over and over – ‘It’s alright, Gwen. Turns out I didn’t need them in the end...”and she’s standing there with her hair all over the place!”

“Are you insinuating that I---“

*

“Do you like Gavin and Stacey down in Wales?” The girl asked back at the talent pool meeting, “Or is it like, cringe because everyone talks about it?”

For what it’s worth, I do like Gavin and Stacey, and I’m very glad to have the Welsh accent branching out more on television. I’m also extremely proud of the Roath Lock Studios in Cardiff, and the fact that there is so much great British television currently being made in Wales.

I began my lecture, and very soon, realised I was going to be late for my bus.

Despite giving myself fifty minutes to navigate my way back to Victoria Station, I took a wrong turning rather early on which left me travelling in the opposite direction to the tube station, adding twenty minutes to my journey.

I had half an hour to make it from White City to Victoria Coach Station, still vouching on a mythical green and yellow train to take me there.

As the clock began to tick, I felt myself start to sweat.

It’ll be fine, you won’t miss the bus... you never miss the bus... things like this never happen to you...

Suddenly, I was fifteen again and all the language trivia in the world wasn’t going to save me from an hour wait in Victoria Coach station with a dead phone battery. Slowly but surely, I stepped from the tube station and moved towards the escalator. People were noticing me. I was shifting from my anonymous safety net and quickly becoming visible again. I stood on the left side of the escalator and began my final mission.

When I reached the top of the stairs I couldn’t breathe. I looked around. I had no idea where I was going.

I looked at my watch, 21.56. I looked across at a poster of a woman with bulging leg muscles in a pair of tiny pants sprinting, the Olympic logo printed on the inner corner. I took in a deep breath of air.

Then I ran.

I ran until my legs were jelly. I ran until I couldn’t speak to ask for directions. I ran because there was a strange man on a bike following me and shouting in strange accent that he was going to take me home.

I ran to the Megabus, and I made it.

Before the last of my phone battery died, a message flashed up. “So was it good, or was it a wasted day?”

I thought about it as I searched for an empty seat of the bus where I could curl up and die with dignity (and lumpy skin) in my own privacy. I’d discovered there was no green and yellow tube train. I came away with some interesting tips for marketing my novel towards the publishing industry, and I’d had some extremely exciting news about getting more involved in Group Therapy FM.

I sat there, sweating, and looked at my watch.

True to form as I looked out of the window there was an Olympic logo winking at me.

21.59. I made the bus.  “Nope. Definitely not a wasted day.” I replied.

I sat there, red faced and sweaty, with my hair a crazy mess and a smile on my face. I reached into my handbag.  

Turns out I did need those batteries after all.