Abbey Road NW8

I did it. I did it! I was a BBC runner for two days, and I ran and fetched and carried and made signs and poured tea and hid under a table and stopped traffic and I survived it all, and it went well.

Actually, surviving the day feels like an achievement; I'm now sitting here in bed with a Border collie asleep on my feet, and have just self-indulgently worked out that since this morning, I've spent four hours on the Tube and travelled about sixty-five miles in total. It's been a loooong day. But I am not complaining. I got from Epping to Chiswick Park in the morning and picked up shipperkitten's house keys, but with some difficulty - the District Line was suspended on just the bit I wanted to go to, and there had been traffic, the initial trains were late, they crawled along between stations frightening slowly, and I ended up getting very, very late. I was mostly unamused for the journey, which was enlivened only by my noticing how bizarre deep-level Tube trains look above ground, and a little boy at Turnham Green, who noted the same thing just as I was thinking it, and then I heard him say to his dad, "The tracks are very dangerous. You could get squashed. Or electrocuted. Or squashticuted."

shipperkitten lives in a very pretty part of London, which cheered me up as I appeared, disappeared and then returned myself to the tender mercies of the Underground, trekking up to St John's Wood feeling like an idiot for being so laaaaate. As it happened, I was only twenty minutes late and it really wasn't my fault, so I made the inner guilty voice shut up and strolled into Abbey Road studios at about two in the afternoon.

Abbey Road! The thrill never wore off. And after going in to check on my groups, I was told to take up tea and a fluourescent vest - we were stopping traffic. And, for possibly the first time ever, this entry is going to be illustrated. (I would like to point out at this point that I was born and raised in Liverpool; this image is part of my mental furniture.)

( Abbey Road! )

And we were recreating it - in a sense; you could say we were parodying it - today. So I made tea and stopped traffic, and when we'd finished with that, everyone filed inside into the recording studio proper. With a handful of other runners, I was making large cue cards with marker pen, handing out food and sneaking handfuls of crisps off the buffet table, lugging drumkits up and down stairs, but mostly, I lurked in a corner of the studio, listening to the people sing, the crew murmuring to each other and, occasionally, yelling, in these extraordinary, brightly-lit surroundings.

At half five, I had to go. One of the other runners - whom I had made friends with at this point; apparently there's nothing like running all over East London looking for toilet paper to help people bond - marched out with me, demanding a cigarette break (she doesn't smoke) and followed me up the stairs. On the way I met Dennis, whom I'd been looking after, and he said it'd been lovely to meet me and he'd see me again when I was a grown-up journalist (I grinned like an idiot and my friend said it was a good sign, that my people liked me, as they would have been the first to complain), and then we went outside and proceeded to take pictures of each other on the zebra crossing. It was wonderful fun.

And then I was running back to the station - again! - and down to Holborn, where Claire and Ben were waiting for me, and it was so lovely to see them. We went to Soho, tramped around in the rain, ate ice-cream and Thai food, and they told me about their day, and I told them about mine, and my week, and theirs, and it was strange and nice at the same time. Apparently they came to the realisation that there was one thing they'd never done, to whit, having a public domestic, which culminated in Ben yelling on Oxford Circus, "You need to give me space! I was never happy in this relationship! I never loved you anyway!"

I'm not sure whether to die of embarrassment or die laughing. They also did sensible normal things like going coat-shopping and to the British Museum. (Claire is one of the few people in the world who has a list of her favourite monuments in the British Museum.) With me, they went walking, drinking wine in a tiny Italian bar where the patrons were screaming at England vs. Israel, and I had a brief who-am-I-how-did-I-get-here moment walking through the bright lights, me and my job and my friends and my rapidly-changing life, and that was strange and nice, too.

Tomorrow! Is Sunday. And I am doing nothing whatsoever. Which does not mean I don't have commitments, because I do. I am commited to doing nothing. I am in Hatfield Heath again, and it is cold and fresh, and there is a dog to be walked and ice-cream to be eaten and music to be listened to. So there.