Break

Walking home from the train, I got snuck up upon by my afternoon nemesis.  Yes, I'm being stalked by a deaf 100 year old paedophilic ice-cream pusher.  How do I know he is deaf I hear you ask?  Well you might assume that wrinkly old fuckers made a bad impression on me once, and that I'm bringing every last one of my anti-old-people stereotypes to bear on him; hence he is old, paedophilic, toothless, wrinkled, worthless, deaf etc. etc.  But that is not entirely the case. 
No this malicious fucker, is deaf because of his modus.  He sneaks up with his ice cream on unsuspecting children and plays them the moving tune of "come get a snow-cone" in a Gary Glitter-esque grooming kind of way. Every-freaking-day!
And judging by the VOLUME that the bastard now plays this tune, I'd suspect that the last vestiges of his senile hearing have long since vanished, blown away by the MEGAPHONE styled speakers BLASTING the oft'licked, never beaten tunes.

Given this, you may well ask how this could possible sneak up on me.  I'll explain...

It all started in Florence, Italy, this Sunday passed.  Awaking from a drunken slumber, the Sunday resolved into a 35+ degree clear sky day.  The only pressing engagement?  A swim in the villa's pool, a leisurely lunch and a relaxed return to London via Bologna where the cheap flight advocates Ryan Air fly from...  Bologna?  Hardly.  At 70 kms distant, Bologna, Fiore can hardly be called B O L O G N A!
It started at about 2pm with a 45 minute drive to the Florence Station, thanks to the handy get-to-and-fro hired car the organisers of our little Italian soiree had hired.  It was efficient, air-conditioned and on time.  It didn't get any better than that.
Que Florence Stazione Centrale (actually is called something else but my Italian's limited, so bear with me).  Sunday.  We had no tickets.  There seemed to be thousands of others in the same position. Fuck...
It took an hour and a half, three ques, multiple swear words and a few free Nesteas (Limone flavour) to work out that the next available train was the only non-EuroStar inter-city at 6.30.  That meant arrival in Bologna at least an hour and a bit later, leaving us preciously short of time to traverse the 70 or so kms I've previously mentioned between the city and the CHEAP airport...  Needless to say that the overbooked train packed with Italians, sans air conditioning (on account of the fact it was broken), got us in late, too late for the 10 euro a ticket for a last-bus-to-cheap-airport bus.  Fuck...
A quick internet mission dispelled the option of aborting the cheap flight in favor of another , easier to get to cheap flight.  They didn't exist.  In fact I can think of ways of hemorrhaging money cheaper than the prices of some of the alternative tickets that were optioned for us in our quick search.  That left us the taxi option.  And that would have been fine, it was air conditioned, it was fast, it was so fast in fact it clawed its way back in the past to make up for some of the train's lateness.  It also cost the earth.  Fuck...
And to help the ongoing saga, our arrival at the check-in counter, just before closure, was met with helpful PA announcement that we'd better clear security asap.  Hurriedly we were patted-down, our bags were scanned and we rushed to the waiting room only to find a helpful LCD screen at the gate flashing a very unsettling "Delayed".  Fuck...
The knock on effect was comical.  Our plane didn't land to pick us up till well over an hour late.  That meant that we didn't have a change in hell of catching the last Stansted Express.  Which meant that we'd be taking the bus, a helpful alternative given the news rushing around the other waiting passengers that the M-whatever-the-fucking-number  highway to London was closed due to an accident.  But that ended up being OK cause we were SO late that Stansted Airport itself decided to shut itself down for maintenance 10 minutes before our updated arrival time was due to land there.  So we got diverted to Luton. Luton?  Yeah, well I've got no idea where that is either!  Fuck...

To cut a long story shorter that the actual 15 and a half hours it took us to get home, we did--get home.  It was late.  Or early.  Depends on your perspective I guess.  Either way I had to get up FAR TOO SOON after falling asleep to go to work.  I haven't caught up yet.  In fact I'm in a daze, and it is precisely that daze that allowed the ice-cream truck to sneaky-sneak up on me.  Fuck...