What with news stand splatting and viciously mean old women, my journeys to and from work have become more and more bizarre. Perhaps they should form the crux of a new comedy skit show:
(Radio Times listings)
Thursday, March 3, 2005
BBC3 – 10.00pm
In which our hero even manages to screw up selecting a seat on a tube carriage.
This evening I went to a magazine party. It was crap. The champagne was warm, the canapés were stale and there was a live band, the type of which you would hire for a wedding reception (“That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh…") And absolutely zero cute boys. By 9pm I’d totally worked the room, at least twice, and decided that it was safe for me to chip off home in time to watch ER and Fool Around With My Boyfriend.
The tube wasn’t that packed. But for some stupid reason, I unconsciously sat next to some guy (not a hottie), despite the fact that there were plenty of solitary seat choices.
So, I was buried deep in my book (“Oh, why, dear God, did I marry him?”) when the guy next to me coughed. It was a cough so deep, hacking and penetrating that it forced me to abandon my reading and vividly imagine viscous phlegm slowly slipping down a pinky-white mottled windpipe.
After a moment or so I’d managed to erase that nasty vision from my mind and was back in Flaubert’s world of high romance, voracious spending and wicked adultery. But only for a few moments as my neighbour decided to spark up a Malboro red.
On the tube.
By this point I’d totally abandoned all hope of discovering whether Emma Bovary would get a good seeing to by the Viscount d’Andervilliers as a result of “accidentally” dropping her fan on the ballroom floor. Instead all I could consider was that my fellow commuters (who were all averting their gaze in a way that said that they were 100% focused on what was happening to my right) might think that the issue sat next to me was my boyfriend. Because, despite the fact that there were many vacant seats left, right and opposite us we were indeed sat together.
Fortunately the excruciating “I can’t believe this is happening 30cm away from me”-ness was short lived as, after only a few puffs, the-most-hateful-fellow-Underground-traveler-ever decided he’d had enough of his cigarette and dropped it on the floor, treading it out with his Reebok classics.
And the rancid fog (literal and otherwise) that I had been immersed in for the past few moments began to lift.
That was until he pulled a small brown bottle from his jacket pocket, unscrewed it and bought it up to his nose, drawing a couple of powerful inhalations through both of his nostrils.
Oh God, I thought. He’s actually sniffing poppers on a tube train.
By this point I'd experienced about as much as I could handle. I closed my book, picked up my bag and strode off, disgustedly, to the end of the carriage.
Ok, I’ll admit that I shouldn't be too sanctimonious about such things. But there is a time and a place, for crying out loud!
For example, 5.30am on a Sunday morning in some randoms bedroom in Acton. Er...
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