Tonight:
9°c
IT WAS not a crowd, rather a loose scattering of disconsolate groups along the platform football supporters of some wretched fourth division team that had lost a match in foreign parts. They carried no luggage, only cans of beer, and their bearing was morose. As one small congregation broke into simple tuneless song, another picked it up but none seemed to know more than a phrase or two of words or melody. Younger men, some adolescent boys, one pre-pubescent holding father's hand, were playful, joshing each other, clumsy with some kind of oriental kick-boxing; others snogged the few uncomely girls, thick of leg, flabby of buttock, masked in make-up, pierced through eyebrow, lip and tongue. Briefly I wondered what it must feel like to snog a mouth encumbered by so much metal. Older men swigged their lager and occasionally launched into incantatory bellows in accents so thick that they were only sounds, not words.
Cowardly, I wandered to the booking office and asked if I might upgrade my ticket to first class. For £25 I could, said the girl, but then opined that there might be no seats and that I'd better stick to my reservation among the hoi polloi in steerage and not waste my money. Glumly I returned to the southbound platform and sank into the shadows until the train drew in. Finding my seat, I hunkered down to read.
"What are you doing in this carriage?" He was the biggest and the loudest of the shouters; earlier, in my imagination, I had unflatteringly compared him with the silver-back gorillas of Rwanda. "You should be in first class," he continued. "Can't afford it," I replied, cursing myself for my ingrained habits of economy. Apart from having to shake his hand and murmur customary pleasantries, that was the end of the encounter and he turned his attention to another passenger he recognised. This was less amusing, for as the lager was repeatedly replenished from the train's bar, the aggression of his intrusion into this man's solitude mounted in menace. His mobile phone his loving wife defused the threat and within moments his victim's phone rang too and he, sensibly, kept his conversation going until his tormentor, weary of waiting to return to the verbal fray, began to provoke yet another passenger.
Why, I wondered, is it possible to buy alcohol on trains? Should not alcohol in public places have gone the same way as tobacco? Isn't alcohol at least as much a curse? Tobacco never fuelled aggression, never induced riotous behaviour, never turned a man into a football hooligan, never let loose our educated inhibitions against public nuisance, violence and random sex, but alcohol is the drug that swiftly stimulates all these. I loathe his second-hand smoke, but no smoker's behaviour ever made me wary and fearful of a stranger.
