What Do You Make of This?

I've been house hunting all week, and staggering back from viewing yet another "Stylish converted flat situated in the sought after Sefton Park area with a wealth of features that can only be appreciated by interior inspection", I didn't realize how far back it was back home, and refused to take the bus.
Convinced that at any moment I would round a bend and arrive at a street I recognized just beyond the endless loop of betting agents, derelict Air Handling Equipment warehouses, soot-caked and padlocked churches, and knots of men with naked heads the color of suet gathered together chatting about bare knuckle boxing and admiring each other's pit bulls, saying things like, "Well, ya look ta haf a winna there, Kev. He's sure ta rip the throat outta summat, doon cha kno.", I stopped in at a Home Bargains and picked up a few things including a two liter twin pack of Highland Springs organic still water (a steal at 98 p), two cans of plum tomatoes, a 100 count box of Tetley's round tea bags (they fit right in your cup), and a pack of Trebor extra cool mints.
Miles later, having devoured the Trebors to lighten the load on the steps of yet another weedy and smashed church with my bags mounded up around me like pioneers sheltering from an Indian attack, I came out into Princes Avenue (not to be confused with Princess Avenue, which is where the hospital is, when you're bleeding from a head wound and asking directions). Most people do not weep with joy when they arrive on Princes Avenue. It is the spine of the Toxteth neighborhood which beat the crap out of itself in the summer of 1981, injured a thousand police officers with smashed bottles and paving stones, setting fire to all of the once pretty Georgian townhouses, the synagogue, and the gigantic Rialto ballroom whose immense and ornately carved copper cupola glowed all night. It is still pretty bruised.
But I knew where I was, and was getting up a good head of steam, when the sidewalk filled with people waiting at a bus stop and as I weaved through the crowd, knee-capping them jauntily with my groceries, a little woman about 60 or so, in a tidy blue sweater, stepped toward me, and said, "Scuse me, luv, would you fasten my lace?" and presented to me her left foot in a little navy blue shoe with an untied shoe lace. And I looked at her and she looked at me through thick lenses and she smiled modestly and looked down at her shoe and leaned one hand against the mossy stone wall beside us and gazed into the middle distance like a little cow waiting to be milked. And I had all this baggage and clanking bottles and plum tomatoes, and I knelt down and tied her shoe and said, "Is that too tight?" and she said, "Thank you, luv." and I said, "My pleasure."
Do you think that odd?
That's what I'm doing in Liverpool UK. I think you would like the weather which is a spanking 7C with a fresh breeze that sends the litter flying. Ah! The sun's just come out. Op! There is goes back again. Ahh, tha' twus loofly, tha' twus.
Liz