Winter is the worst time to use public transport: Sitting beside people spluttering, sweating and sneezing up their diseases and watching numerous sticky and clammy hands grip onto the hand rails in a form of unpleasant viral pollination. Looking out the window desperately ignoring this festering can of illness you are aboard is no good either, as the windows run and drip with the condensation droplets of a thousand breaths out of bacteria glooped lungs.
A bus in winter is surely god's petri dish.
Of course, whatever the season, there are always risks riding loose on the public transport. Having to put up with annoying strangers where our paths have crossed only because we both happened to catch the same bus is one of them.
In the past few public transport experiences I have been sung to by a strange, thin, little man in his late 20’s, dressed like a marathon runner, performing fully U2’s Beautiful Day (complete with Bono lunging to-and-fro stagger in my general direction) at a bus stop then stopping to take in our (absent) adulation – at which point I would have loved to have started a round up of Gay Bar (complete with jagged arm motion on the lyric “I’ve got something to put in you” in his general direction) with the other waiting commuters. I have been suggested as a potential husband to a girl by the rest of her Romanian family of professional beggars (I don’t speak Romanian, but sometimes you don’t need to). And I have been on a packed commuter bus where two young lads were talking loudly.
One was saying that he had a “hangy, man” from drinking the evening before (I correctly ascertained this was some sort of verbalised text speak for “hangover”) and that having a “hangy” when also having to work (presumably in Top Shop) was “not good, man” and that he hated having a “hangy”. “Hangys are the worst” apparently, “but a hangy shows you had a good time, man”. Ah, the catch-22 of juvenile alcoholic self-poisoning.
His pal then talked purposely loud, for the benefit of all us other passengers, for 20 minutes about how he finishes his work “early, man”, then he is liberated: “I can go out drinking and if I get a hangy I have all night to get over it” and that, now he mentioned it, he felt sorry for everyone on the bus having to go to their “boring office 9-5 jobs” because it wouldn’t be him: “I couldn’t work like that, man, in an office”. He couldn’t understand why people would go. “Look at them all, man.” He went on (and on) “all going to their rubbish jobs, man, all of them miserable on the bus because they have to go to work in an office, ha, ha! They can’t think of anything else to do, man, they are all so boring man, with their office lives. Look at their faces, man! They don’t even want to go, man. No one is having fun like me on this bus, man. These people on the bus, man, they’ve got it bad, man. I feel for them all, man, ha, ha...”
I took a snipers glimpse of him, in his grey beanie hat and postman’s uniform.
Yes, that is the true freedom – the life of a Postal Worker. We all envy them when we watch out the windows of our cubed offices as they soar, spiralling, forever upwards, into the sky each morning, at the end of their working day. They are neither bound with limits of science nor tethered to our grim rule of law. They are only held back by their own imagination and wanderlust.
Yes young Sir, you are a regular blue thing from Avatar.
Women want to be seen with you, men to be you. But men can never be you, for they are just men, not Postmen, like you.
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