Small gestures can make me massively judgemental.
Casual discarding of your chocolate wrapper on the pavement makes me rapidly sketch a psychological profile of your stinking humanity.
If you cluster around a train door in the platform and nudge on before others have disembarked, my mind has soon sketched an ugly image of your venal mind and its awful, selfish actions and gestures.
I have just experienced the ecstasy of privatisation with a train journey from the west on Christmas Bank holiday monday. We will take as read the train companies inability to attach enough carriages due to the possibility of making their shareholders sad.
If the only picture of humanity offered to an advanced alien race was the behaviour of passengers on this journey, one would see no argument against the planet being blasted away to ease intergalactic travel.
The suitcases were largely the size of two conjoined twins’ coffin. The addition of wheels to luggage has been a retrograde step in the evolution of decision making. Without the stopping pain of carrying our baggage, we have become unthinkingly flamboyant in our packing.
Fair enoug, you need stuff and you need it with you always. Drag your carry on coffin wth you.
My angry despair only kicked in when I saw the crowd’s inability to know what to do with their luggage and themselves when others needed room too. They earphones were in, the phone attached, all other sensory input vanished. All the cats were dead and alive.
But no cats existed, unless they were on the phone.
Each new breathless passenger huffed and drooled and swore, but from the moment they had a space and somewhere for their bag to be strewn, they retreated from existence.
Aggravating lard ghosts.
Having secreted myself between carriages, one foot in A and one in B, after securing seating for my family, I surfed the metal plates and attempted to use my exasperation for good.
Initially, this could be done in silence. Despite the years many have spent with their nose facing Tetris, their has been no practical offshoot education in how to fit shapes together. Some people just stopped the moment they and their cargo were on board, the people behind them were out of mind. I asked to take their case (I have untheatening hobo chic) and carefully add it to the pile by the opposite door where I had indulged in my mute portering.
After telling someone I would look after their bag while they looked for a seat, it turned out they presumed I was now a complimentary guard all the way to London. On handing it back to her at Reading, I received no tip.
By Taunton, I had to explain to people that, due to volume, they might need to moved a little further down the carriage. They looked at me with perplexed faces. I tapped the farting man next to me on the shoulder (oh what ghastly farts they were, shit sieved booze bubbles) and explained that we might need to stack all luggage that was cak-handedly vomited around the toilet so that people could enter both the loo and the train at the next stop. He moved aside so that I could manhandle the shiny crates into a more economic shape, then let out a sort of suprised “oh yeah”, when I had done it.
The same confusion occured when many had to disembark at Reading. This was a Crystal Maze for the overly lobotimised. There were few traces of frontal lobe activity. Some fell, failing to notice the objects as if only the shape of their own boxes was recognised by their monkey brains.
Next time, I will take fruit rewards in the journey, in the hope that will increase chances of new learned behaviour.
I turn to a news website when I get home and read of empathy, charity, bravery and altruism in the shadow of the floods. I am not entirely without hope. Maybe there is a small chance we will be allowed to remain as an impediment on the intergalatic highway.
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