Ranting

This seems to be the season for people to yell at me. On Wednesday I had some guy come up to me at the bus stop on Byres Road and start barking loudly at me about "those Asian guys over there". "Not that I'm racist or homophobic", he said (always a bad sign) then went on to complain bitterly about how they'd cut in on a conversation he was having with the woman "behind the bar...I mean counter in Oxfam" (a Freudian slip perhaps). When he finally paused to draw breath I asked him why on earth he was telling me all this, and I didn't see why I should be berated by random strangers while waiting for a bus. To which he replied that I was "as bad as them!" and stomped off in the huff.

Usually the folk who try to engage me in conversation at the bus stop are a bit puzzling for one reason or another, but perfectly friendly. Sometimes too friendly. Recently I've chatted to: an old lady who told me her life story; a disabled guy who seemed very nice, but I couldn't quite make out what he was saying; and a very drunk student who smoked intently at me for a few minutes then tried to kiss me as I got on the bus (which had arrived just in time).

However, today the piano tuner turned up and spent the first ten minutes or so yelling at me for having "killed this piano!" This always happens when I get someone to tune the poor thing. I tried to explain that it wasn't my fault, my parents - whose piano it actually is - had originally kept it next to a radiator, unloved, for about five years before I rescued it. As usual, this cut little ice. But also as usual, he managed to get it back to a perfectly reasonable state for a pianist of my limited abilities (they always do, being good at this kind of thing).

He did mutter darkly, though, that it wouldn't be at concert pitch. I suppose I'd better ring the RSNO and tell them not to bother coming round for that concerto we were going to play in the dining room...