It’s often said that London is an unfriendly place. After experiencing the silently hostile, eye averting intimacy of the early morning commute these past couple of weeks, I feared that I was turning in to one of those people. If you’ve ever lived in London, then you’ll know exactly what I mean. In my defence, there are only so many strange groins a girl can take nestling in her lower back of a morning.
An invited groin however, is an entirely different story…
By the time I got to the office, I was already thoroughly irritated by everyone for purely selfish irrational reasons. Everyone – from the woman smirking as she scrolls through her iPhone, to the guy who insists on reading City AM leaving me with no over the shoulder entertainment and especially those who carry the unnecessarily oversized backpacks. The latter of which is completely irrational because I am notorious for doing this myself – which, in itself is a pretty mundane thing to be notorious for. But still, it’s all I’ve got. I haven’t killed anybody…yet.
I guess we can safely say that P.Diddy won’t be rapping in my memory any time soon.
As I stood there one day, focusing intensely on the shard like dandruff of the man in front of me, I realised that the type of people that get the tube on a morning can be compartmentalized into two simple categories; those who wash their hair and those who don’t.
I hate them both equally.
The ‘wash and go’ population annoy me because I am so close to their sopping wet heads that I am intoxicated by the smell of their coconut shampoo and it makes me feel like I’m in the most disappointing Bounty advert in existence.
And the rest?
Well, they just annoy me because I can smell their scalp.
I’ll let you decide for yourself which category I fall into. See, completely irrational.
When I started imagining the people who try and squeeze themselves onto an already overflowing tube, as those poor people desperately clinging on to the edge of my lifeboat as I try to float away from the devastation of the sinking Titanic, and yet I still wanted to peel their fingers from the doors and push them away by the face in order to safe myself – I realised it was too late.
I already was one of those people.
The sort of person where a ‘Fatality on the Track’ announcement means nothing more to me than ‘Overtime’. Now, despite what you may think of me, I’m not usually such an uncaring inhuman bastard, I have been known to be reduced to tears watching BBC3′s ‘Underage and Pregnant’ – so as you can imagine this has come as quite a shock to me.
I suffer enough from an unintentionally miserable face as it is, without having to have the personality to back it up.
I decided that things, sorry – I needed to change. So today, I smiled at a lady on the bus. Partly out of politeness, but largely because she was carrying a homemade globe fashioned out of a disco ball with an atlas intricately illustrated in poster paint on the surface and a plastic Jesus glued to the top. The attention to detail was exceptional; I’d never even heard of The Republic of Equatorial Guinea.
At first she looked wary of me, and I almost felt embarrassed for openly welcoming her with my face. She must have clocked the almost panic stricken sincerity in my eyes and luckily she took my smile as an invitation to sit down. I shuffled in my seat so she could get comfy and then we both looked at each other and smiled again. I have to say, it was most pleasant and I felt somewhat content with our silent respect for each other; and probably just a tiny bit smug.
That is, until she plunged straight in with her opening gambit and said: “Have you ever been thin?”.
Lesson learned London, lesson well learned…
What they fail to point out on those ‘Stranger Danger’ posters that you see idly jotted around, is not what a stranger might try and offer, or if your lucky, do to you – it’s that they might actually genuinely want to talk to you.
Eyes down all the way people, eyes down all the way.
Kaz xx
