At the airport (wee small hours)

“Maybe you’d still be stuck over there if you hadn’t listened to us mate.” The mate was said in that aggressive tone that imbues the word with a sarcasm level that seems out of place when the speaker isn’t a teenager. The person who said it was a cockney, about my age speaking to her son – chap of about seven.

I don’t want to get too defensive towards her son. For one, he’ll almost certainly spill some mug’s claret before he hits the big fourteen (monkey see – monkey do). And two, they’d almost certainly think I was a nonce for questioning why I didn’t think it was OK to front up your own small child – he was about seven.

On the train (early)

Who are these people with the stones to leave all their stuff on open display when they go to the john on a train? What are they trying to prove and to who? Are these made men/women who have the cosa nostra protection making them impenetrable to crime?

Maybe rail travel creates a theft vacuum, a metal tube of honesty that the outside, crime-ridden world to penetrate. If so, rather than send them to prison, habitual thieves should be made to work as ticket collectors as a punishment – as opposed to clogging up prisons crowded with 1970s celebrities.

I suppose it is nice that the national rail network serves as a reminder of  a bygone era when people could leave their MacBooks in their kitchens with their back doors unlocked, or their iPhones playing in the front garden without fear of serial killers stealing them. Indeed a time when serial killers could be left in their cells with the doors unlocked, prison guards assured that honest to goodness 1960s killers would wait for the hangman’s noose.

Getting a very early tube makes it feel a bit like everyone in London died off zombies.