So anyway, I’m walking down the passage that runs through Allders, connecting George Street to North End. A primitive retail intestine, splattered with symbiont bacterial concession stalls that facilitate the absorption of cash into Allders’ corporate self.

Just to drift immediately off at a tangent…

Until recently there was an unintelligible shop there, which sold a weird sub-set of the set of all viscous liquids, from enormous and multi-lobed bottles. At first I thought that it was a viscous gift shop – exotic oils and syrups – but in fact the range was far more esoteric than that. Imagine having a strangely shaped stroke to the left hemisphere which leaves you profoundly agnosic, able to recognise only a handful of really unusual things. But you’ve got to make a living, and you’ve just signed a lease on the stall. So you somehow persuade a fully brained-up friend into laying the catalogues out on what you would, before the stroke, have known as a table, and buy stock of anything that you can name out loud from a picture: coolants, lubricants, alginate gels; isinglass, sugar soap concentrate; the synovial fluid of butchered cattle; acrylic monomers; the seminal fluid of dogs; sap. I don’t think the stall’s there any more. Perhaps its business model would have been better suited to online sales channels, or perhaps there was another stroke. I can’t think what’s there in its place, either. Perhaps I’ve had a stroke myself.

But anyway.

I’m walking down the passageway and this woman stamps in off the street, dragging her two-year-old daughter and shriek-barking over her shoulder, “She. Is. Only. A. CHIYULDDD! You are a RUDE! And IGNORANT! MAN!!”

Hammering down the corridor. “How DARE you? You are RUDE! And IGNORANT!”

At that moment, around the door frame appears a frail, bookish-looking, late-middle-aged asian gentleman: about five feet five inches in height, fifty or sixty years old; back bent from a life of cataloguing things or correcting the content of ledgers. He looks like he’s about to speak, but doesn’t quite dare. He tentatively raises a hand, his fingers shaking, and she screams over her shoulder, “HOW DARE YOU?” The accountant is close to tears, cringing behind his bifocals. “You are RUDE, and IGNORANT!”

She drags the little girl into the children’s clothing department of Allders, spitting at the child, “He is so RUDE! How DARE he?” – raising blisters on the toddler’s scalp with her hatebreath.

I can’t imagine what the poor guy’s done; he doesn’t look like the racially-motivated-wang-exposing sort.

I was left wondering whether moods or emotional “states” are, in fact, self-perpetuating modes or patterns of activity in the nervous system; whether the woman’s rage came from anger at something she thought the old man had done, then more anger at the embarrassment of a disporportionate or inappropriate response, coupled with a habit of identity-defense through attribution of causality for all that anger to external events and people.

I was intrigued by the idea that the situation had devolved to the point where she was directly projecting her own rudeness and ignorance onto someone else. Although perhaps he had in fact flashed his cock at her daughter. On North End, with half of South London out Saturday shopping at the spring sales.

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