Central London, near Waterloo Station is the locale for my misdeeds during the 9:30am til 5:30pm slot, while after dark (and before arriving) I become a super-market-research-hero-in-disguise 'MARKET RESEARCH MAN' and do my best work on the 7:49am Waterloo and 6:05pm Southampton Airport Parkway. My worst work by far is done on the 7:38am express to Waterloo, which although cutting the commute by around 20 minutes does force me to either a) get in the way of the wheelchair zone on the floor of the train and defend my space like a threatened, cornered junkyard dog or b) stand near the toilets (which are a constant parade of ugly people who clearly can't hold it in for longer than 17 minutes) with my 'lap'top held in my hands.
My second-worst work is done in front of 'Who Dares Wins' or 'The Weakest Link' or 'Deal or No Deal' or 'Antiques Roadshow (which is playing 24-7). But that is due more to a morbid fascination with the pure abhorrence of television over here. It is so bad that I can't even stand watching an entire show of anything. Even the news. We have it good in Australia - we really do.
But I digress...
So other than battling Waterloo Station, which resembles a seething nest of slightly pasty, overweight and bad coffee-drinking ants and working, I've not been doing much.
However, we're still keeping our weekends really full, and our trips to Bath and Winchester were really nice, and the Jurassic Coast was brilliant, and gave us a bit of much-needed fresh air.
And then there was getting my hair cut at a hairdressers in Bath with a man who looked alarmingly a little too like Legolas from Lord of the Rings. No shit, he was a dead ringer for him. Disturbingly my hair did not reflect the fair tresses of our elvish friend (nor did he cut it with his singing bow), and instead a semi-decent but butchered cut on top combined with a buzz-cut combo on the back left me looking a little worse for wear.
And there is of course the crazy sheltered-workshop lady who works the trolleys at Waitrose supermarket in Portswood, who appears to have worked out that I'm freaked out by her, so she deliberately talks at me (can't really tell, but she looks at me and shouts stuff, can't really understand words per se). I'm not sure what to say in reply, so I just nod and nervously make any noise my mouth can muster.
Oh yeah, and the psychotic-shaved-headed-folding-bike-man, who takes out man, woman, child and otherwise (and there are many in this category) to nab himself and his strange folding bike one of the 7,320 spare seats on the train changeover at Basingstoke.
So I will continue my plight of working 11 hour plus days of pure, untainted Market Research; solving the world's social and market information deficiencies one PowerPoint slide, one Excel spreadsheet and one VLOOKUP formula at a time. I AM MARKET RESEARCH MAN!
It's hard work, but someone has to do it.
