Nutella

Sitting on the no 43 heading at a pace towards all the broken promises of Holloway road I was briefly deafened by a woman with too much perfume on. I looked up and she was shouting:

"NO MATE NO! CHURCH STREET...YEAH THE ONE WITH THE CHURCH ON IT"

And so the excited rant went on before she put the phone down and began to roll a cigarette. I watched the precision with which she pulled the strands of tobacco from one another before placing it on the rizla and after a few seconds returned to my book so I could continue to struggle with the rudimentary causes of the Spanish Civil War.

A few seconds later the stench of her perfume was muddled with another more homely smell, a smell that took me back to my glutinous adolescence. I looked up and she was eating a slice of brown bread piled high with nutella. It was as if she had made it there and then, because if it had been in a sandwich bag, surely all the nutella would have come of on to the cellophane?

Perhaps, I thought, she was a magician and she had conjured this wonderous snack from the remnants of her rolly.

She got off the bus at Archway, I felt nothing.

Journeys into an unknown nostril

Yesterday I sat opposite a man who at first glance looked like any other thick-rim bespectacled, man bag carrying, check shirt wearing, London based 30-something male (I have just described my boyfriend but this is not he).

On closer inspection he had a comb-over, a greasy blond comb-over at that. His glasses were quite mid 90s in a Germanic sort of way, his man bag was probably from Next in a not very nice sort of way and the check of his shirt was ill considered in a yellow and grey sort of colour-way.

He was reading a book entitled Winston's War which was not, as you might expect, the tale of the perennially mute market stall holder and the conflicts he endured during his fruitful career in Walford. No, this was "a compelling new novel exploring Winston Churchill’s remarkable journey from the wilderness to No 10 Downing Street at the beginning of World War II." by Michael Dobbs.

Now, I mention this man, not for his choice of book, but rather his actions whilst reading it.

I was looking at the floor, I like the floor and looking at it. Then I looked up and the man, we shall call him Helmut, was picking, neigh rooting, neigh excavating his right nostril. Fine I thought perhaps he is scratching, but this went on for about a minute. Deeper and deeper into the void did his right index finger venture. Surely he must realise that the curly haired stranger sitting next to me and I were watching in horror/ morbid fascination at this display. He did not. Because then his index finger retreated from its hermitage and was met by his thumb and together they rolled the snot retrieved into a tiny ball, flicking it and then repeating the whole scene a second time. To pick once may be regarded as a misfortune; to pick twice looks like

disregard for the rules.

'What rules?' You say.

'You know,' I say ‘the rules’.

Nausea on the Northern Line

At present I mostly get the bus, hence the title of this blog but sometimes I venture underground and today I got the Northern Line from London Bridge, it was filled with Polish people, I think they were Polish, there were lots of them and they seemed quite happy.

My mood had been buoyed by the fact that I had seen probably the world's most amazing puppy. He was gadding about, attempting to eat his lead and looking happy (perhaps he was Polish). His owner walked beside him, glowing with pride as she watched the hearts of her fellow commuters melt into their collective metaphorical briefcase (I say metaphorical errouneously, because actually it was literal, all the commuters carried one giant briefcase with their days work all mixed up together so that on opening it they found, to their dismay, that there was in fact no order to the world and so submitted to chaos and half baked dreams of one day owning a small Polish puppy). I digress.

So I got on the High Barnet branch and browsed the Metro and became briefly enamoured by multi gold medal winning swimmer Michael Phelps -did you know that he's arm span is longer than his height- I wonder if it would hurt if he hugged me and also would his arms go round twice? The girl to my left elbowed me. I glared at her; she had a Roman nose and liked to talk to her friend about club night listings, tonight they will go to an electro-clash and house night in Kings Cross, I know because she was shouting, she may have been Polish.

Hung-over, was I. An underground train can sometimes be good for a hangover, so dark and miserable is it, but no so today because today I felt as if the train was sinking. Just as the girl on my left had made the decision to enjoy an evening of House music I noticed some nose hairs sitting on my right. The hair came not from the nostrils, but from the bridge of the nose, this is a common enough occurrence but most people trim them.

He was staring at me not in that surreptitious, ‘I’m staring at you, but you're staring at me too and this is allowed because this is a municipal transportation system’ way. No, this was just staring in the ‘not allowed regardless of the public nature of my journey’ kind of way. Even more off putting was the fact that because he was sitting next to me it meant that he had to turn a full 90 degrees to do so. Even more off putting than that was the stench, the putrid fragrance that came, perhaps from the nose hairs themselves, perhaps from his jacket but more probably from his trousers. For me what is worse than an awful smell is the thought of the awful smell; how it got there? how long had it been there? could he smell it? Then I gagged for several seconds. I think he saw me retch. At the next stop I moved seats and sat at the other end of the carriage.

On taking my new found seat I was greeted by the oomptcha oomptcha sound from the head phones of the man opposite me. He wore round dark glasses, a Motorhead hoody which had a picture of a skull with tusks on it-it looked like an angry dead walrus- and his hair was mousy brown, long and lank and sat veil-like across his pasty forlorn face. He was wearing rather smart shorts, which was odd. He got off the train at Camden Town. Obviously.