Inspired by the lovely Scarlett’s new blog I decided to add a splash of colour to the site. Scarlett writes about gardening on her allotment and uploads images of sexy Italian seed packets. She is also growing her hair as long as is possible, which appears to be quite long.

Readers of the blag will know why this little number caught my eye! Yes, it’s a routemaster which is an icon in its own right and a personal emblem of my life as a little Londoner climbing onto the yellow-lit bus with my mummy when all and everything was right with the world. It’s also a 28 which was the bus that shuttled me to a new universe when I went to sixth form college and discovered West London. The girls I met there had clothing allowances and went shopping on the King’s Road as an activity – like volleyball or reading. It was all terribly glamorous to my eye, which although sharp enough after years of training at St John’s Wood jumble sales back in the day when old ladies really did throw out Hardy Amies dresses, had never seen so many shiny and unaffordable things.

Anyway, back to Sunday afternoon in South London. Yemisi had come by to interview me for a podcast he’s making for the National Association of Literature Development. We spent the day geeking about blogs and blogging until our minds bloggled and it was time to catch the Victoria Line up to Tottenham to see Aoife Mannix’s excellent and gleamingly polished one-woman show Growing Up An Alien at the Bernie Arts Grant Centre (I just couldn’t seem to say it any other way and it would be rather wonderful wouldn’t it?) in which she shakes up the story of her life in a snow dome.

Yem went off to have roast chicken and rice and peas round at his sisters and after the performance I congregated with Malika Buddy and friends in the bar and spent a good twenty minutes ordering curry goat from a bemused and remarkably patient French waiter. On the way to the tube we stopped by the grocers to buy pumpkin for Miss Fast-Lane who was suffering period pain. She planned to cook it up with sauted onions and brussells sprouts, a strategy that everybody concurred was radical.

One of the things Yem said he likes about Blag Lady is the way the stories often come full circle. I like that too, so there was a wonderful sense of serendipity when sitting on the Victoria line heading south I looked up at the girl opposite me and noticed she was carrying a rather divine bag. I didn’t get a pic – tut tut – but it was oversized, a blue-grey woven leather the colour of the sea in Suffolk on a showery April afternoon, with perfect chestnut brown handles. When I asked the girl where she’d got it her eyes lit up: ‘oh this old thing…I picked it up in a charity shop.’ I should explain here for the uninitiated that there is NOTHING more satisfying to a seasoned shopper than having a stranger on the street/tube/bus enquire about the provenance of one of your best bargain buys that is also a charity shop one-off…it’s basically hitting the jackpot.

That made me feel good, in a blag-bag-lady camaraderie kind of way, a sort of My Name is Earl karma-credit in reverse. Nice.