‘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.
