Weird Commuters No.2

A woman sitting across from me on the tube.

A fixed scowl, of determination or concentration I don’t know. A bright scarlet coat and scuffed leather boots, she writes in a large moleskin notebook. She lays out a whole spectrum of coloured markers on her lap and begins to carefully annotate her words.

What I expect to see when I voyeuristicly glance at her notes is a bulk of text or graphs with precise and meaningful coloured marginal notes. What I see are 5 or 6 words to a page, spread across with varying widths and at crazy angles, with a veritable rainbow of whirling seemingly-random lines and squiggles all over, each laid down with such care. Complete gibberish.

Precise careful squiggly gibberish.

I’m reminded of this song by Underworld “8 Ball” (forgive the fan video on YouTube):

My London: Monday 18 November 2002 “BOMBER” “MADMAN!!” “EXPLODE”

Coming in on the tube, I read about an attempted gas attack last week in the London Underground. All very scary. As the tube begins to go overland I see that London is shrouded in a thick blue mist. Visibility is so limited that the skeletal gas towers and iron bridges begin to strobe past me before I even notice their arrival.

I think about reading “Underground” (a book of interviews of survivors of the Tokyo sarin attack), and I look about the carriage. For a brief while, the only people I can see are those in the train with me. An Aisan man in a grey suit, about 22 years old reading a copy of the “Metro”, and a white woman looking pale and haggard on this Monday morning.

Graffitti suddenly veers out of the fog: “BOMBER” “MADMAN!!” “EXPLODE”