I’m lucky with public transport: I get the best of it. First, because I live in London, which is arguably, disgracefully, the only place in Britain where it is any good. Second, I don’t have to use it much in the rush hour, which is rarely fun wherever you are. On public transport, stuff happens. If you’re in a cab – fascinating though conversations with the drivers can be – or driving yourself, not so much does.
At 11.30 last Friday night, after a few drinks and a meal for a friend’s 40th, I was on the Piccadilly line home. The seats were all taken, so I stood by the door and stared at my phone for a bit. At the next stop, a bloke got on, I’d say in his late 30s, and stood next to me. He beheld me with glazed eyes and then, very slowly, collapsed. I recalled a bit of sports punditry about a boxer hitting the canvas having taken a big punch. He was described as having “gone down in instalments”. That’s what this guy did.
Crowded as the carriage was, it was definitely me in loco parentis. Everybody really should do a first-aid course; like nearly everybody, I haven’t done a first-aid course. If I had, then I would have known whether I was right to give him a gentle shake of the shoulders and (weird, this) a little stroke of his cheek, and ask him if he was all right. He didn’t respond, so I just stood there looking at him, wondering what to do. Soon he threw up. He did so silently, copiously, colourfully. It looked as though he had been eating a tin of raspberries in syrup. It was that colour. Quite a bit of it was on the end of my shoe, making it look like I had a purple toecap. With the benefit of no medical training whatsoever, I judged it not to be blood. I later asked a doctor, who told me it could quite well have been blood.
Another shake of the shoulders and pinch of the cheek yielded a little grunt. He looked pretty stable the way he was slumped. Still, I had no clue how to proceed, beyond taking a seat and letting him be someone else’s problem. This is what I did when a lot of people alighted, all taking care to step over the raspberry vomit that had run along the bottom of the sliding doors.
I resumed staring at my phone. When I looked up, the man had vanished. I stood up and asked my fellow passengers if they had seen where he’d gone.
“I threw him off,” said a rather kindly looking middle-aged woman.
There then followed a version of BBC Radio 4’s Moral Maze featuring me, this woman, a couple of rugby league fans from Salford, three Estonian tourists and a woman who said nothing but effectively registered a complete lack of interest.
Was I the bad one for moving away from him? Or was the woman bad for throwing him off? Should anyone else have done anything? The discussion was spirited. The consensus reached was that none of us should be proud, but neither should we be ashamed. Nice to meet them all, though.
If you need help to calm down, try taking up crochet
I also became engrossed in a woman’s crochet work this week.
I was sitting opposite her on a tube train, rattling west towards what GK Chesterton called the sunset side of town. It was her intensity that drew me in. It became as hypnotic for me as it seemed to be for her.
She conjured up one square after the next, starting each one slowly, accelerating to a ferocious pace before stopping abruptly to produce some very severe-looking little scissors to trim the thing off.
It says something for her focus that she never once spotted this large bloke staring at her, slack-jawed in admiration. Eventually, I had to ask her what she was up to. She didn’t seem to mind having her trance broken. “I’m making a blanket for my niece’s first anniversary,” she said. “I must make 260 squares for it.”
She told me she was Polish, and I started blathering on about my Croatian nan’s crochet, hoping to elicit something similar from her, but no joy. “I learned from YouTube four years ago,” she said.
“It is good for calming down,” she added. “Because when you do this, you can’t think of anything else.”
This put me in mind of a tap on the shoulder I got from Roy Keane once. He was sitting behind me on a flight to a Champions League game somewhere. “Have you seen the bloke sitting next to me?” he whispered. And there was quite a tough-looking man there, knitting. “He looked so happy,” said Roy later. “I was a bit jealous of him. I should try it,” he laughed. Now that would be something to see.
I asked the Polish woman if Polish men did crochet. “No,” she said.
“Too macho?”
She shook her head. “Too lazy.”
Lessons in prayer and patience in the bus queue
A bus route starts and finishes outside my flat. I was in a rush somewhere but the doors were closed, even though I could see the driver was on board, standing in the middle of the lower deck. I glared at him. No response. Annoyed beyond measure, I cupped my hands to the window to glare the more. He was praying. It was beautiful. Every scrap of irritation drained away. When I boarded, I asked him what he did if he was driving when the specified prayer time arrived. “Do it when I stop,” he said. “But it’s much better like this.” He smiled a fabulous smile.
