Gara’s Weblog

I have been away for a few days, enjoying the mountains, the sea and the sun, and just this afternoon I returned to London to dive into a grey wet sky. How uplifting it always is, to return home! One knows one is in London because the trains are disgustingly dirty and slow, in the tube you inevitably bump into those almost prehistoric boards in which they announce the endless list of lines that are not working, and people push you, in a mysterious and absurd attempt to touch their Oyster cards on the reader before you. Once in the train, the seats and the people stink equally, but today I was the victim of something that I thought was definitely beyond the limits of my own imagination:

The train was packed, and I was having trouble managing to keep my suitcase steady, and in the meantime holding a backpack on the other hand (I couldn´t really leave it on for two reasons: a.-people wouldn´t be able to stand behind me, and b.-the risk of theft rises substantially). At one point, the seat in front of me was left free, and I moved towards it to sit in it, but this obese woman who had been standing next to me clearly thought she was entitled to have that seat before me for the mere reason of being ultra-fat, and tried to push me out of it while I still managed to sit down. The fact that she had lost it really got her going, and so she said, out loud, that the seat was hers, and aimed to sit on my lap. She literally sat on my right thigh, which nearly burst under her weight. “You move over”, she said, “I am going to sit here”. Oh, but now I was annoyed: I have no compassion whatsoever for these people, more when the solution to their problem is in their own will to change it- which is 99% of the cases anyway. I should have said, quite directly, that if she found it so difficult to stand up for a while she only had to loose some weight, but instead I chose to be politically correct (I feared the hordes would jump on me and murder me, should I have said what really crossed my mind), and told her: “This seat is for one, not for two, and you are super rude. Leave the seat NOW”. Which she did, after a little while, making sure that everybody learnt what an inconsiderate, heartless being I am.

None of the members of the audience uttered a word, of course- only one woman sighed and rolled her eyes to me in symphathy, and I felt… well, less lonely. One feels comforted with very little these days.