Watermelon Pip Spitting Competitions

I work in Central London and it would be fair to say that the daily commute, which takes me on foot through Trafalgar Square and St James Park, is getting increasingly stressful. With all the hype about the millions who will be descending on London for the Olympics, nobody said anything about the millions who would be descending on London for the Diamond Jubilee. Hoards of lost tourists wandering up and down the Mall disconsolately looking at maps, or milling in their droves around Buckingham Palace, or watching the Grendadiers rehearsing their bit for the Trooping of the Colour, means the daily commute now involves squeezing through aimless hoards, or worse, talking to them. For myself, I have an escape plan for the Jubilee weekend. Not, you understand, from the Jubilee - that simply won't be possible, not least since we are going to a chocolate box village in the Cotswolds which I imagine will have shut off every available through road for a Jubilee exhibition of tea cosies, or similar - but an escape from the Jubilee in London. Let's face it, with all those tourists, what are the chances of seeing anything of the flotilla or of the marching Grenadiers,except on BBC? Meantime, the warm weather continues so I am inspired to invest in a chunk of watermelon. I love watermelon, not just for the melon, but for the seeds you can spit out (yes, I am that disgusting), and the joy of my adolescent life, watermelon pip spitting competitions, is a legacy I fully intend to pass on to my kids. Like many pointless activities - beer mat flipping etc - there is an art to it, getting enough saliva behind the pip to achieve a projectile effect - well, you get the gist. And since birds love them, I consider this a highly organic pastime. And for those of you scratching your heads and wondering why on earth anyone would bother, here's the thing. Tomorrow I have six, yes six appointments at my local hospital, all related to my orthopaedic "issues". This being the NHS, none of these six departments share systems, nor communicate with each other in any way, which means each visit needs separate questionnaires, blood tests, assessments and waiting lists. There are many sources of stress in life, of which the most acknowledged include moving house and getting divorced, but I would put hospital waiting rooms right up there. For each clinic there is at least a one hour waiting time, so without any idea of when you will be seen, by whom or for how long, you are trapped in a windowless, miserable room with understaffed stressed out clerks, wishing to the Almighty that you could be anywhere else, anywhere please but stuck here. Usually after a marathon like this I have to go for a furious 80 length swim, or I indulge in major shopping therapy, because frankly it's either that or it's run amok with an axe. So. Watermelon pip spitting competitions are a foil to this angst-inducing, mind numbingly bureaucratic, dehumanising, demoralising, bureaucracy. Nuff said.