Some things are less painful than you might think. Others.....

I bumped into an ex-boyfriend last night. By bumped into, I mean we were both on the same boat, on a river cruise down the Thames. It was quite a small boat.

There we were.  Trapped in a confined space for four hours with no way of escape unless you wanted to swim, and have you seen the Thames? No one wants to swim in that. (Unless you happen to be the very drunk man I saw a few weeks ago doing breaststroke in bright pink boxer shorts by London Bridge, apparently.  But his is a story for another time.)

This whole scenario has recipe for disaster (BBC election coverage ringing any bells?) written all over it, you might think.  Especially when I tell you about the free bar.  (There was a free bar.)

But you know what?  it was fine.  More than fine, actually.  As we chatted, and caught up on news, and talked all about The Past and marvelled at how much more grown up and sensible we both are these days I remembered exactly why he is, even now, one of my favourite people on the planet. (To be fair I haven't checked absolutely all of the people on the planet yet, but I'm pretty confident.)   We bantered and reminisced and in between all of that some apologies were made, old debts were settled, and I laughed more than I have in a very long time.  It was a really lovely evening.  If I do say so myself, I have excellent taste (mostly*) in ex-boyfriends.

Then on the way home, I fell down an escalator at Westminster and did this:

(That is a sideways view of my leg, which is sort of hard to tell. There is large-ish (larger than it looks here) gash down the middle of it. I also have a massively bruised and slightly swollen toe, which, annoyingly, none of the photos I've taken so far have quite managed to capture in all its multicoloured splendour.)

Some things are less painful than you might think.  The escalator at Westminster tube station is definitely not of them.

*There are some notable exceptions to this rule.  You do not need to know about them.