Tbat’ll be me …

Let’s take a wide-ranging gen­er­al­isa­tion for a walk, shall we? I used to think that com­plain­ing about the weather was a sign of get­ting old. One becomes middle-aged, ergo one starts com­plain­ing about the weather. How­ever, to the cli­mate whinging I’d now like to add — com­plain­ing about roadworks.

On another issue, do you ever worry about becom­ing one of those people who rants on pub­lic trans­port, par­tic­u­larly on buses? You know the type — they stumble unstead­ily up the gang­way towards the driver and pro­ceed to launch into an unin­tel­li­gible diatribe about a sub­ject of great con­cern to them, but which few other people can under­stand. Indeed, it’s at moments like these that the aver­age pas­sen­ger will sens­ibly decide to hide behind their news­pa­per or sud­denly decide to stu­di­ously exam­ine the dis­play on their mobile phone.

Don’t look at him. Don’t look. If you don’t inter­cept his gaze, you’ll be safe.

This morn­ing, I was unfor­tu­nate enough to be trav­el­ling on a bus in the Ham­mer­smith / Shep­herds Bush area — where almost every road cur­rently resembles a build­ing site and con­sequently the buses are trav­el­ling very, very slowly — with one of these embar­rass­ing pub­lic ranters. Fine, I thought, just another aspect of London’s char­ac­ter­istic urban melt­ing pot. I can cope with it. Sigh heav­ily and resign myself to the fact that there’s a traffic jam, then care­fully exam­ine the fas­cia of my mobile phone while some gen­tle­man enter­tains the bus by shout­ing about how the coun­cil is being incon­sid­er­ate, there should be more bus lanes, they’re always dig­ging up the roads round here, they shouldn’t be work­ing on Shep­herds Bush Road at the same time as they’re dig­ging up around the Green, and so on and so forth.

It was all much as nor­mal, then — until it slowly dawned on me that I was no longer con­cen­trat­ing intently on my phone, but instead I was star­ing at the com­plain­ant. Worse still, I was agree­ing with him. Even worse, I almost felt like get­ting up at the front of the bus and hav­ing a loud whinge too. Transport’s in a ter­rible state, blah blah blah; I don’t pay my taxes for this, blah blah blah; bloody gov­ern­ment, blah blah blah; today’s kids don’t know they’re born, blah blah blah.

I’m not quite sure whether this was pre­ma­ture middle age set­ting in (along with a desire to be a rant­ing bloke in a trench­coat), a sud­den explos­ive allergy to pub­lic trans­port, or a grey Thursday morn­ing attack of London-itis. Whatever, I’m going to have two Nur­o­fen and a cup of cof­fee and try and dis­miss the epis­ode from my dis­turbed thoughts.