Day From Mars

Every so often, you have a surreal day...
The Song Circle met early morning: Katy turned up in the most enormous red and pink sunhat and fuorescent yellow mac; Nadya came in a fetching black sun visor and massively high platforms; Rowen came with a huge red flower in her hair.
Me? I was wearing a Westwoodesque silk shirt, worried by Offsprog One's plan to take me to a hippy cafe in the afternoon in Leeds.
Anyway- it was an emotional Song Circle morning, but a good one- we laughed and we cried. The others went off to the park and I went off to the tube station, heading for Leeds.
On the train sat a slender man in short black shorts and black vest, suntanned arms and legs and celtic tattoo, with sunglasses and an iPod, gazing about him in that blank way sunglass-wearers have. He suddenly reached into his expensive leather bag and got out a black leather roll, which he unrolled on his lap, to reveal a barrage of the most expensive looking paintbrushes I have ever seen- some of them had white and black fur (badger?) and were fluffy, some of them were a rich brown (sable?) and sleek, all shapes and sizes and all brand new. There must have been more than fifty of them. How weird! There was something sinister about the way he displayed them on his lap in such a way, all splayed out and pointing at the passengers on the train. Then a man got on with a large double bass in a padded case. Then a woman got on and sat beside me and opened a little book with squared pages. There were tidy notes in the book, and the top one said 'square rings'.
On the way to Leeds I marked three labour-intensive dissertations, one with excruciatingly long sentences taking half a page each so by the time you got to the end of them you had forgotten how they started, and one by a very intelligent person who had no grasp of writing in the English language, but I could tell what they meant, and it was very clever. How do you mark that?
In Leeds, I visited Offsprog One's art exhibition, and I thought she was brilliant, but I would say that, wouldn't I? She had made a hand out of melted wax crayons, and the fingers were turning into crayons.
On the way back, the ticket barrier spat my ticket back out at me, contemptuously. I feebly went to the station man and he let me through with a hiss of disgust. As I got on the train I noticed I had bought a ticket for the first of August by accident and hoped the ticket inspector wouldn't come round. No such luck! He spent almost half an hour admonishing a woman a few rows away who had lost her ticket, and told her to get off the train at Doncaster and get two hundred pounds out of the cashpoint to buy another one for her and her daughter. Oops! So I handed him my ticket and I think he knew I had the wrong one, but he had blown himself out by then, and he just clipped it and moved on.
Phew! That was close.
As I walked down our street, I noticed a lumbering shape by the fence. It was a little hedgehog, who rolled up and then unrolled to see what I was doing. I was taking a photograph of it, of course, which I will put here tomorrow.