‘Hello, mumble mumble…’

That’s what it sounded like. I turned around and saw a man grinning widely, walking behind me on the footpath.

‘Hello,’ I replied and kept walking.

‘Mumble, mumble…’

Huh? I took out my one of my earphones and looked at him, puzzled.

‘Are you going home?’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’

Oh not, he was a weirdo. I put the earphone back in and kept walking.

‘Mumble, mumble…’

Again, I took an earphone out.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked.

I considered my options.

‘I’d rather not say,’ was what I settled on.

I jammed my earphones back in and continued at the same steady pace. I didn’t turn around but could feel him drop away.

This Saturday, I am going to a Hallowe’en party. The theme is to come dressed as something you’re scared of.

I’ve decided to go as a bee or a public toilet. I haven’t yet decided.

For my bee costume, I would buy yellow duct tape and wrap it around a black skivvy. Maybe I can fashion some antennae and some kind of stinger using pipe cleaners. But wings, what about wings? And the extra two limbs?

The public toilet is a little bit easier. I can hang a WC sign on me with a ‘woman’ silhouette on the front and a ‘man’ silhouette at the back. Around me, I can loop empty toilet rolls, which are a great fear within my general fear of public toilets.

In anticipation, I have taken to collecting empty toilet rolls.

‘Look!’ I exclaimed, waving three empty toilet rolls at my housemate Aoife, who had just arrived home.

‘Well!’ she laughed ‘Have you been conquering your fears and taking toilet rolls from public toilets?’

‘Of course not,’ I waved excitedly. ‘I got these from work! I think we use up lots of toilet paper at work!’

I was walking home from work along a main road when a bus roaring up beside me erupted into flashes and smoke.

I stopped and so did the the two people ahead. The bus, unharmed, continued on.

Another explosion. This time it was a rocket with a trail of white smoke behind it. BANG!

Tentatively, I started to walk again. Behind me, there was another RAT-TAT-TAT of machine gun fire sounds and yellow bursts of light appeared in the corner of my eye.

I turned to watch the group of six or seven kids throwing orange sticks in front of cars. The sticks exploded.

I watched for a minute, hoping to intimidate them into stopping. But another firework launched, again one of those rocket-type ones.

So I pulled out my phone and pushed 9. Then 9. Then 9.

‘Hello? What’s the emergency?’ asked the voice.

‘There are some kids throwing firecrackers into the traffic,’ I heard myself say. ‘It’s a really busy road.’

‘Police, then? You want the police?’

‘Yes.’

I waited two dial tones, then: ‘Police, what’s the situation?’

I told them where I was and what was happening.

‘Are they fireworks or crackers?’

‘Crackers, I think. They throw these sticks and it takes a while to explode into sparks. There are loud cracking sounds. I think they’re crackers.’

‘Okay, we’ll investigate,’ said the phone voice. ‘Do you want to leave your name?’

‘Ah, no,’ I said. ‘I won’t be in the area.’

I hung up, then went on to the gym, then home to cook dinner and fold my laundry.

I wonder if the police came.

I had forgotten what it was like to click with someone on the first meeting. I mean really click. Going beyond ‘Oh, she seems really nice. It’d be good to meet again.’ I mean the kind of rapport when you could sit and talk for hours, even if you can’t remember her name because when she first introduced herself, you didn’t pay special attention because you didn’t know you would click.

I haven’t clicked with someone new for maybe a year or two. However, on Friday I met two people that I found so likeable that I had to eventually force myself away to mingle elsewhere in order to stay within the normal bounds of first time friendliness.

I didn’t want to scare them away, although probably they liked me too and were also trying to calculate the right time to move on. I suspect that clicking has to be mutual.

The first person I clicked with on Friday is an older woman who leads the maritime business for a rival consultancy. She was sitting next to me at a gala lunch. We didn’t talk about anything in particular: work, business ethics, accounting systems, our old teachers. It just seemed that we always had something to say. We swapped business cards and I hope I can see her again some time.

The second person I clicked with is a man about my age who used to work at my company, but now works for another rival. I had just arrived at a house warming party and warned him about a giant bug crawling on his shirt. We also got talking about everything and nothing. I don’t think I’ll see him again unless our mutual friends organise another gathering.

It leads me to think about what my click quotient is. I will define this as the proportion of new people I meet with whom I click. I wonder if people have similar click quotients?

Originally, I was thinking that people have different click quotients depending on how open their personalities are. That is, the more easy going, receptive and chatty you are, the more chance you will click with a stranger.

But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe for those people who perceive that they click with many people are in fact just meeting a lot more people because they are:

• in a new situation, such as a new job, course or city, and there are lots of people to meet; and/or
• extroverted and comfortable chatting to strangers, and so in any particular room of people, will meet more of them.

So what I mean is maybe the there is a general trend for people to genuinely click with, say, 10% of people they meet. The people we see who seem to have a rapport with many people are simply clicking with 10% of a larger number.

But perhaps the opposite is also true. Maybe when you click with lots of people, you don’t think it’s all that special. Certainly for me, having not clicked with anyone new for so long, it felt a bit wondrous to do so on Friday.

Another factor is probably also the crowd that you’re moving with. If you mingle with people who have the same interests and background as you, then that might increase the click success rate.

I wonder what the smallest length of time is that you need to speak to someone before you click?

I wonder if clicking really must be mutual? (otherwise the result could be stalking or uncomfortable distancing)

I wonder if some people with a lower click quotient experience more profound/deeper clicking when it happens?

I wonder if you don’t click with someone straight away, you can develop the same rapport over time? If this happens, is it something new that has developed or is it the discovery of something that was always there?

My habit is to take a low key approach to celebrating my birthday. I assume that people aren’t really interested.

That’s why I was surprised and really touched a few weeks ago when my team mates at work presented me with a birthday card signed by all and a massive cupcake.

Another pleasant surprise was the natural banana flavour of the icing, despite its artificial, almost glowing, yellowness.

Today, I took my bike out for the first time in two months. Despite the interval, I could still more or less expertly unfold it and launch onto the road.

However, I was terribly wobbly. I almost immediately veered into the queue cars and vans parked along the street. How could my riding have become so rusty in two months?

I hopped off the bike and lifted it to the curb. Ten seconds inspection revealed the problem. The front tyre was flat.

I wheeled my bike to the second-hand bike store where I had bought my lock and lights. A man with a Canadian accent and two centimetres of cigarette butt in his hand helped me attach the bike pump to the wheel nozzle thing.

‘Have you got a puncture?’ he said. ‘It’s really flat.’

‘I haven’t ridden it in a while,’ I said hopefully. I hoped it wasn’t a flat. I don’t know how to fix those yet (Damjan did buy me a book, I’m sure I can look it up).

‘How can you tell?’ I asked. ‘If there’s a puncture, I mean.’ For some reason, I had a mental image of putting the tyre in a bath tub of water. It just flashed into my mind and I didn’t have time to figure out what it meant.

He said, ‘If it’s flat again tomorrow, then you’ve got a puncture.’

I took this to mean that it’d be fine for me to ride today, and so I continued on my planned 20 km ride along Regent’s Canal and Victoria Park.

It was cloudy but dry, a good day for cycling except it became chilly by late afternoon. Also, my helmet was probably on too tight so my head hurt.

The expedition ended two hours later, with front tyre still firm. I felt proud. This was the first independent longish bike ride I’ve done on my new bike.

Tomorrow, I will squeeze the front tyre to see if it’s lost much air. In the mean time, I’ve been pondering the strange mental bath tub image. I now know what it means.

As kids, Jason and I had a number of blow up vinyl toys (didn’t everyone?). For example, we had blow up baseball bats, which we used to swat each other.

Once a few rounds of swatting had occurred, these inflatables would eventually start losing air. I remember dad taking various inflatable toys to the bathroom, putting them in a full bath tub of water, and squeezing them. We then followed the stream of bubbles back to the indistinguishable location of the leak.

The inflatable was then dried and patched with sticky tape. And thus, it lived to fight another day.

The family living in the flat next to ours have a large white fluffy dog. While I washed my breakfast dishes, I watched the boy play with the dog in the concrete square at the centre of our block of flats.

The dog looked frustrated. It was darting here and there but no more than two metres at a time because the boy was holding tightly onto its leash. I guess the boy had no option, as there is no gate to our concrete square. An unleashed dog could have run away to the wild open streets of London.

I remember seeing the boy play with the dog a few month ago. He threw a stick. The dog stood beside him, apparently confused. Only when the boy faked a sprint towards the stick, did the dog start running towards it. The dog skidded and made three attempts at picking up the stick before success.

This incident made me realise that the dog, though large, is actually quite young. A big puppy.

I also didn’t know that dogs aren’t born with the instinct to fetch.

In the first three months of the dog coming to live amongst our flats, he barked and barked. The family would frantically shush him. Soon, they too were barking. I couldn’t walk past their front door without setting off a canine and human symphony.

I think the dog has learned. I can now walk by and two-thirds of the time, the dog would watch without a peep.

Some mornings on the way to work, I see the family out for a walk with the dog. I hope they go out every day, even twice a day. It must be hard for a big dog living in a two-storey London flat.

Deliberately, I brought the yoghurt foil lid came closer to my face. Then I licked it and a highway of silver appeared through the creamy yellowness.

I giggled then glanced around to see if any of my colleagues had heard. I was filled with a familiar giddiness. When was the last time I had licked a yoghurt lid? I felt like a kid again.