Too school for cool?

Just when I start to think I’m a bit this side of cool I go and do something risible.

Today as I emerged from Kings Cross Underground station overloaded with far too much luggage (as per usual) I was totally unprepared for the amount of construction work taking place. My path around the building to the Overground train station was restricted at every turn. Eventually I spied a sign indicating the way and so followed it blindly down a narrow pathway between the construction barriers while being pushed and shoved by fellow commuters.

The path ended when we were all squashed into a pokey little box room. I took this opportunity to look around and realised that I was not in a lift as I had originally thought, but in a little prefabricated hut. I was also the only one in the room not wearing high-visibility orange safety gear or a hard hat. I seemed to have been herded into a construction workers meeting. Looking around in apparent bewilderment my eyes met the twinkling gaze of a grey haired, hard-hatted gent:

Bob-the-builder: A’right lovey? How’s your laying? [Chuckle, chuckle, dirty wink]

Me: I beg your pardon? [I get embarrassingly posh in circumstances involving builders and double entendres]

Bob-the-builder: ‘Ow’s yer brick laying? [Sizing me up using the glad-eye]

Me: Eh? [Staring mutely in rapid blinking wonderment at room full of yellow hard hats]

Bob-the-builder: I take it you want a job if yer in here.

Me: [Penny dropping] Ooh! [Uttered in weird pitch 3 octaves higher than my usual voice, followed by nauseating girly giggle] How silly of me. [I may have actually fluttered my eyelashes at this point] This isn’t where I need to be! [Embarrassing girly giggle again] I’m so very sorry, must run! [I think I did a weird toodle-pip sort of wave at this stage, before grabbing my wheeled luggage and trundling out of the prefab office as gracefully and quickly as I could under the circumstances.]

Bob-the-Builder: [To my disappearing form] Come back next year love. We’ll be recruiting then. [Cue guffawing laughter of the assembled construction workers]

I was feeling a spot mortified by my apparent transformation into simpering doe-eyed dear at the mere whiff of a room full of testosterone stereotypes but then I remembered that the actress Vanessa Redgrave once said, 'A girl should know how to play tennis and dumb.' I’m still a bit of a rubbish tennis player…