David Gillon

 Just whizzed over to the station to pick up my tickets for Wednesday's trip to Durham.

Immediately outside of the station is a dual carriageway (the A2), with a pedestrian crossing. So I crossed the first half without incident, got to the second half and waited for the lights to change. The lights changed to red, a couple of cars stopped without incident and I started to cross from one side while a pedestrian crossed from the other. At that point a cyclist sails through, completely ignoring the red light, and not even bothering to slow down. I watched him and it was clearly a deliberate decision, not "Oh, shit, I was daydreaming". He was closer to the pedestrian than me, but if I'd hit that segment on the roll rather than from a standing start I could easily have been moving fast enough to make a collision unavoidable. His refusal to react when yelled at made it clear it's probably something he does regularly.

Tired, so flumped out on the three-seat-sofa (recently liberated from several months use as an extra storage area) for three hours.

Woke up with hips screaming, which was puzzling as even sleeping on the far-too-short two-seat-sofa doesn't normally trigger them this way.

It's taken me an hour and a half to realise that I'd forgotten to renew my butrans patch (should have been done Tuesday), the dosage is out of my system, and this used to be my normal pre-painkillers.

All hail better living through opiates!

(Stumbles off to find butrans).

Pleasant lunch over in Rochester at my usual venue (plaice fillet with braised Little Gem lettuce and capers, yum - not sure I've ever had lettuce cooked before, but very tasty) with my friend and her adult daughter, all of us bemoaning the election result, then just as we were getting ready to leave (I was planning to go and gloat outside the UKIP electoral HQ a few doors down as one of rhe few electoral bright spots was they lost their seat in Rochester),  I checked my pockets to make sure I had everything, and no car keys.

My friend was all 'You can't have lost them, check your pockets again' and 'do you have any more pockets?', her daughter, having famously done this with parents car while she was in London, forcing her dad to drive the spare set over from Rochester, was on track much more rapidly. Clearly I'd had them when I locked the car, but since then I'd wheeled over about 300m of cobbles and flagstones, any of which could have bounced the key out of my pocket (fortunately just the one key, I have the rest on a separate fob).

We retraced my tracks, but no sign of the key. My friend suggested I get a taxi to go home and get the spare set, her daughter, more practically, said ''Mum, why don't I just go get your car and drive David to Chatham' (we were about 5 minutes walk from their house), to which the response was 'Oh, I use the car so little I completely forgot about it'. {sigh!}

So her daughter nipped off to get the car, and we stood around waiting, While we were there we bumped into her next door neighbour, passed the time of day, and were both stunned when said neighbour announced that she was so disappointed Farage wasn't elected as 'he's not like other MPs' (we'd just explained how he was) and 'he listens to his members' ('telling him who they hate' I commented rather snidely). Slightly scary as she's an otherwise nice and intelligent woman.

After what seemed like ages (turns out they'd had to pump up a tire) Stephanie turned up with the car, we lobbed the wheelchair in, drove over to Chatham, I grabbed my spare keys from the house and we were back at my car within about 15 minutes of her picking me up, in fact just within the two hours parking limit.

I'll give the police a ring on Monday to see if the keys have been handed in, but otherwise I'll have to see about ordering a spare set. I'm just glad my friend had decided to come out, I didn't have my phone with me (I'd forgotten to charge it) and the only alternative would have been to trek up to either her house or another friend who lives in the area, hoping one of them was in.