Chapter 14

‘Lions have never experienced Thursdays.’

Dail had no idea why this thought had suddenly occurred to him, here, whilst waiting for the train to work. He had equally little idea why the fact that a large African cat not being privy to such a nothing day of the week instilled such a sense of pity in him; especially one that could maul him to death with such relative ease. It’s fine, Dail thought. I can always hide in Thursdays. The lions will never think to look for me in there.

Assured of his safety, Dail reflected on one of the reasons he liked living at the end of the Northern Line: he was always guaranteed a seat on his morning commute. Apart from on Wednesdays. Because Dail didn’t work on Wednesdays, thanks to the day he stumbled across an unattended computer at work that was open on a certain file for editing. So now he had paid leave every Wednesday. An entire day to not travel during rush hour in. However, this is what he was doing now, not that it was that much a problem because, as we recently discovered, Dail was always guaranteed a seat on his morning commute.

Once he had commandeered his usual seat (at the end of the row up against the glass, for optimum leaning and minimum pushing past people to get to the door) and the train had pulled off, Dail began assessing the world via the free newspaper. Hottest summer in a long time, eh? Well thank you Mr Newspaper. The ridiculous heat outside was leading me to believe otherwise. I was on the verge of thinking that…what?! Who gets on the tube with timber?!

Someone had just gotten on the tube.

They had some timber.

As it turned out, builder/DIY types get on the tube with timber. Dail was not a builder/DIY type, hence his confusion. But his lack of construction finesse was most probably a good thing, as he held the belief that a ‘So’ should be a legitimate unit of measurement. His reasons, or so he claimed, were that if something can be ‘so’ big or if there can be ‘so’ many of something, that it must be one already. Because of this, the following kind of conversation had taken place on more than one occasion:

“How much do you want?”

“About 5 So’s please.”

“…what?”

*sigh* “Ok…hold out your hands as if you were saying something was ‘about so big’… Good. That is one So. Times it by 5 and that’s how much I want.”

Dail rarely got the right amount of whatever it was he needed, but at least it proved that the So worked in principle, and this made him happy inside.

Having abandoned any notion of reading the paper, Dail was now reading his fellow passengers instead. For the most part, this made for fairly dull reading, though there were, as always, a few notable exceptions. One of these was the most amiable, pleasant and huggably chubby man Dail had ever had the pleasure of slapping his ocular sensory organs upon. But he was trying desperately to not start beaming at this poor, unsuspecting man because, as any Londoner knows, smiling on any form of public transport (especially prior to at least 10.30am) was a faux pas of epic proportions. Dail had no understanding of what a faux pas was. He dimly remembered hearing it in a social setting once. However, it was quickly followed by laughter from the people he was with and he had decided that it was better to go along with it than steamroll their merriment for the gain of trivia which, he suspected, would have violated some hidden cultural rule and would have been highly frowned upon indeed. Then everyone got very drunk and that night Dail lost one of his shoes, but gained a flip flop with a small portion of the Underground Tube map printed on it. He generally tried not to dwell on the hellish kind of transaction that was very likely to have taken place that night.

To return to the chubby, cheery looking fellow (whom we shall refer to as Bob, despite him not really taking any further part in later events), Dail was now effectively fighting a war of two fronts within the confines of his own face,  between grinning like an idiot and not breaking Tube Law (it’s like Jude Law, but spelt differently. And not the same in any way). The resultant expression was akin to that of a man who has felt a sneeze coming for the past 30 minutes, but has just been told that there was a ham sandwich waiting for them, should they want it. The good kind of ham, too. The kind that’s really thick and juicy. Not the thin, dry stuff that looks like the product of an abandoned skin graft of an ostriches neck.  Dail was saved embarrassment by Bob reaching his destination and exiting in a jolly kind of way. Bob would later eat a disappointing ham sandwich, but would this break his sunny disposition? Actually, yes. It did. Bob wrote an angry letter about it, because, despite being chubby and cheery, Bob was British and no amount of ham sandwiches were going to stand between him and a letter in which he got to complain about something.

Two stops after Bob’s departure, something happened that would be classed as ‘bizarre’ even in Dail’s hypothetical ‘The Hell Was That?!” filing cabinet. The middle aged Chinese woman sat next to him (who, to Dail’s knowledge, had been fast asleep) suddenly flung both her arms straight up in the air, dropped them, and then had the audacity to act as nothing had happened. He could only assume he had just witness one of two things. Either, he had just seen one of the most extravagant Hypnic jerks (look it up) in commuting history, or a middle aged Chinese woman had just tried to instigate a Mexican wave…on the tube…during rush hour. He was so stunned by seeing a bit of mass sports fan activity taken so far out of context that it didn’t even occur to him that he was next in line. This Mexican wave had died an early death because of Dail and Dail alone. This had completely counteracted Bob. This wasn’t a tube ride anymore, he concluded. This was now a rollercoaster ride. An emotional rollercoaster. Haaaaaaaaa. Funny. I’m funny. Ooh bugger. Goodge Street. Work. Haaaaa. Goodge. Every time. Funny.