April 3, 2008
When Redleader selfishly ups sticks for fully-team-membered-up conferences in London, leaving me to misbehave disgracefully attempt to run the show, it also has another, quite horrifying, consequence.
Oh yes.
Public. Transport:
Yes, the netherworld of tinny iPods; women in their 50s who work in department stores and stink of Musk and still think that gives them a right to sit; people with spots; crap free newspapers - and yes, I do absolutely spot the irony; the faint, lingering smell of medium-flavoured cheap cheese; an incredibly annoying twat taking up half a carriage with his fucking bike; red-faced alcoholic ticket checkers; and, ultimately, the terrifying realisation that the sub-human Sun readers around you sanguinely assume you're Just One Of Them.
That said, travelling goat class does occasionally throw up a few gems, and not least of all this very fine and sunny eve.
I have descended from the scarred and scorched earth that is Birkenhead into the tunneled gloom of Hamilton Square station: Here, dear reader, when some 100ft doooon, there be tygers.
And there are drunks, and smackheads, too.
As I quickly traversed the underground concourse into the worm that leads to all-trains "Nice Bit Of Wirral - Not The Other Way, Known, But Never Spoken, As Badlands" I spotted something - a fashion victim girlie walking along in Victoria Beckham-stylee pitch black, covering-half-the-face shades.
We were walking in the same direction, and I confess to cowardly being quite pleased that for once it wasn't me when the stumbling, dribbling, green sick-stained pair of wretches, him about 21, her about 23, approached her.
"Eh, luv," screeched the girl, "Are youse all right?"
The girl flinched, startled.
"Y-yes," she said.
"Are youse fuckin' sure, luv?" asked the girl, reaching out a rat-like paw as if to offer comfort. "Cos I thought youse must be fuckin' blind."