Spreading a little commuter cheer

Whilst I’m not trying to deny the seriousness of the various attacks taking place around London at the moment, my natural cynicism makes me think that I’ve already detected a hint of ‘near miss’ exaggerated bravado from certain people. Oh, come on, if you’ve overheard any conversations in the capital recently, you’ll know the kind of exchange I’m talking about:

“Oh, it was such a close thing. I was very nearly at the scene of that attempted bombing at Warren Street yesterday.”

“Really? Where were you?”

“Travelling out of town on the East London Line towards New Cross Gate. But, y’know, I could have been there only an hour or so before.”

And yet, I can’t help but mention that I was on the tube train just ahead of the Stockwell shooting this morning. Our train was about to pull out of Kennington station, but no sooner had it started than it shuddered to a halt only a couple of feet into the tunnel. A member of tube staff, accompanied by two policemen who seemed to have materialised out of nowhere, rushed up to the driver’s cab, and then a woman’s panicked voice shouted up the platform from the rear of the train, pleading with the driver: “Can you close the doors? Please. Please”.

We sat there nervously for two or three minutes, while more police officers arrived and rushed up and down the platform looking for something. Or more likely someone. It was only when the police finally entered our carriage and asked us to evacuate the train and the station in an orderly fashion that we were told the reason for the alert - a ‘suspect person’ on a train - although at that stage we didn’t know whether it was right there at Kennington or further up or down the line.

In the carriage where I was sitting, four people burst into tears when the incident began. One woman a few seats down could clearly be heard crying: “But I’m pregnant”. It was a very long two or three minutes - even by the standards of the typical ‘London Underground minute’ that we’re so used to the platform displays using when the next train is due - so one middle-aged man in builders’ overalls decided to try and lighten the mood (in a perfect example of this nebulous ‘Blitz spirit’ I keep hearing about) by asking people what they were planning to do at the weekend.

Now, conversations with complete strangers aren’t my strongest point, as many readers will know. But this was an extraordinary situation, and I probably wasn’t in quite the right frame of mind to quickly employ my usual impenetrable barriers of shyness. Besides, my thoughts were already racing ahead with what I have to confess was a ridiculously cartoonish vision of a supposedly typical suicide bomber - wires, dynamite and a large digital clock counting down to zero all strapped to his chest, standing spread-eagled across the connecting door at the end of a tube carriage.

So I answered my fellow passenger’s question without thinking. Indeed, I answered him without one single coherent thought about what the bloody hell I was saying. Oh, the shame.

“Well, it’s my birthday tomorrow, and I’m going to see my new baby niece; she was born just over a week ago.”

“That’s nice,” he replied. “Happy birthday, mate.”

I hate people who call me “mate”. Even at moments when I might be staring death in the face whilst sitting in a metal tube deep below the streets of London, I still hate people who call me “mate”.

He was about to ask the same question of a women sitting diagonally opposite him, who had been dabbing frightened tears from the corners of her eyes since the moment the police appeared on the platform, when the doors opened and we filed out of the station in a calm, dignified and typically British fashion - meaning that there were lots of murmured apologies for accidentally knocking elbows. We were probably very defiant too, according to the adjectives that we’re supposed to use at such moments to describe the mood of Londoners.

I wasn’t feeling particularly defiant, though. More scared. Scared and, well, bloody stupid. I don’t make a habit of announcing my birthday in public. Desperate for attention? Yes, of course. Desperate for so much incredulous attention? No, not really.

“See ya, mate,” the man in overalls called to me, through the throng of displaced commuters spilling out onto the cordoned-off streets of Kennington.

“Er, see ya,” I answered self-consciously, as I suddenly (but sensibly) returned to my usual wariness of talking to complete strangers on public transport.

So yes, I’m 34 tomorrow, but don’t bother to wish me happy birthday, because some bloke on a tube train caught in the middle of a security alert has already done that, probably to the vague astonishment of a couple of dozen silently terrified passengers.

Sometimes my behaviour is woefully inappropriate.