I have written this blog in my mind this morning on my journey from Catford to Kings Cross St Pancreas...Why is it that Londoners can indicate what they feel in one short, sharp cough, or muffle, noise, or look whereas it takes others around the country lengthy words and expressions?
It is fairly obvious to every Londoner on the 7.49am Kings Cross bound train, when the 52 year old balding man wearing a beige Mac coughs at you, he is non-verbally telling you to get-out-off-his bloody-way-as-he-has-to-still-drag-his-arse-onto-the-train-in-this-freezing-weather-to-go-to-work-for his-unappreciative-31-year-old-boss-who-has-just-rolled-out-of-his-nappies-and-thinks-he-knows how-to-do-his-job-better-than-him. Funny how we manage to decipher things by a nano second sound.
On the same 7.49am train two lovers board and sit right opposite me. Obviously in the first throws of a relationship, as he stared at her and she giggled like a school girl. To be honest she probably was one, but you can’t always tell now days, so it’s best to err on the side of caution when addressing people /giving up your seat...Is she pregnant or is she chubby? Am I going to get a slap if I ask when the baby’s due? Everybody else in the carriage is visibly greying at the sight of these two lovebirds as they look longingly, wishing they still felt like that in their relationship, or had held onto the person who had made them feel like that. Was it to late to change? Would she still be interested if I picked up the phone and apologised? As my eyes met several staring back at me, a flicker of recognition, and then... gone. “London Blackfriars next stop, please mind the gap”.
The other day I was sitting on the train to Liverpool Street and saw a middle aged woman looking at another female with a frown on her face that would stop most children dead in their tracks, even the unruly ones you get now days. The woman in question was feeding her child rice crispy breakfast bar on a train at 8am. Now, I do not have children, but even I know that is not the most healthiest thing to give a child in the morning, but who am I to judge? I am no expert... but after a few moment I realised it wasn’t the rice crispy bar that was causing a frown, but the fact that the mother was young, with the fresh wash of youth still on her face, fully made-up, hair immaculate, nails manicured and tapping away on her blackberry, something which I realised that this woman with the knitted frown on her face did not appreciate in the slightest. It may not have been her youth, waif like figure or her apparent disregard to her child’s breakfast needs, but the fact that her personal grooming appeared to come above the need to ensure her child had eaten well in the morning. Which brings me to the question...once we are mother’s do our own needs stop? Should they stop? Was this mother wrong for feeding her child a rice-crispy bar, or had she been up all night with a child who had a fever who had refused to eat anything, and she was trying to bribe him to eat with something that resembled a treat before she went to drop him to a government funded nursery whilst she ran to college and stood on her feet all day at beauty college so she could get an education? Despite the fact I am childless the “look” penetrated my soul and my Dior mascara wand was quickly put back in my Gucci handbag.
Through daily interactions with others, walking past people at terminals, a polite but firm cough to ask them to move out of the way, a glance to say I want you, I stare which says I wish I had that, a nod to say thank you for letting me pass you on the stairs, a knowing look to say I understand you are late in this rat race we are all living in... London is like no other city, polite niceties and thank you’s are found in a nod, a look and a cough...which only a true Londoner will understand and others will always find baffling, because how can you understand a language that can not be taught, but is lived?
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