There were seven of us at the bar last night, and the bill came to $90.37. We left $100, which amounts to a tip of just over 10%. Out the door we went into the streets of New York.

Across the street, we were chatting before going our separate ways. Suddenly the waitress was there, having run across the street after us! We hadn’t paid properly! She showed us the bill for $90.37 and the $100.00 we had left and explained that this wasn’t good enough, a tip of 18%-20% was customary.

[16 September 2014]

The other day I managed to take notes on a stretch of my stream of consciousness, put salt on its tail. Why am I thinking of asking Kate about Judas’s betrayal of Jesus, I asked myself? I worked backward till I had figured out the chain.

Biking to work, I passed a woman in Indian clothes. That got me thinking about the rape problem in India, which the new prime minister Modi is fighting. How silly it would be if an Indian claimed that the reason for the rape problem is that Indian men have stronger sex drive than others, hence India’s big population! China has grown more slowly, yet China is strong and India is weak; there’s so much more to the power of a country than the size of its population. Britain, for example, was small when it ruled the world in the Victorian era. Remember that headline from the good old days, “Storm in channel, Continent isolated”? But they say the headline is apocryphal. What about this word “apocryphal”? It alludes to the Apocrypha, but where does that come from — is it Greek for “alongside-writing”? The Gospel according to Judas is apocryphal, but something has bugged me about Judas. If Jesus was such a notorious rabble-rouser, why did the Romans need to hire somebody to point him out? I must ask Kate; maybe she will know.

All this happened inside my skull between Meadow Lane and Donnington Bridge, where I stopped the bike and grabbed my notebook.

[31 July 2014]