Hedgewizard in the City, Part 2

People watching is one of my principal joys on a visit to London. The capital seems to be populated with some splendidly contemptuous females, although why this should be I have no idea. As Witchypoo and I were hurrying to catch a central line tube* at Embankment I was treated to a suitable display. My eye was caught by a man flapping his hands in an unmistakeable 'calm down' gesture while his twenty-something girlfriend, hand on one hip, regarded him through narrowed eyes. People were boarding the train behind the couple, but something in her face was creating a bubble of clear space around them, and straying into it would have clearly meant an agonizing death. If I was to use the word glare accurately here, I would first have to bash her gaze against an anvil a few times to take the edge of it. She absolutely blazed at him, and whatever he had been saying trailed away into nothing.

There was a long pause, and everything around them seemed to go still before she spoke.

'You know your problem?' she asked him. The pause stretched on. He didn't dare reply, but silence wasn't going to help him. 'You're such a wanker.' And with that she turned on her heel and stepped onto the train. He visibly reeled from the force of this pronouncement, and by the time he'd collected himself the doors were closing and the girl was whisked away into the bowels of the city.

Excellent.

"Watcher" on Google Images. Couldn't make it up.

Later that same evening on the platform at Paddington, I tuned in abruptly to a conversation that was going on right behind me. I'm not sure if it was the words that alerted me or the accent, which was a bizarre mix of cockney and north african, overlaid with a twist of a hackneyed carribean lilt that sounded suspiciously like Hollywood jamaican.

'What you have to remember, man,' the voice said (although it was more like Wad-ya hev-da re-mamba, mon) 'Is that this is Africa, right here. It doesn't matter what it says on the maps, this is Africa.'

I felt myself turning involuntarily, as if I was on casters. There was no way I could not look at the speaker. My mind's eye had already painted him in as a Rastafarian version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the reality was more surprising; he was a dapper little man dressed in a sharp suit and a pair of eye-watering winkle pickers** with the ensemble completed by a little Tommy Hilfiger paper-and-string carrier bag, which he carried in a way which made it clear that it held something small and hysterically expensive.

Africa, indeed. Excellent.

The last noteworthy conversation sat itself down right beside me, as Witchypoo and I slogged our way back to Victoria to catch our coach back to Hicksville. These two were office workers in their late twenties, and apparently firm friends. It transpired that the male of the pair had been touched, er, somewhat intimately by the office letch who was;

• Creepy
• Of senior rank, and
• Unexpectedly bisexual in one of those terrifying rumour-mill-failure moments that life likes to throw into the mix from time to time.

The Fondled was very obviously embarrassed about this, and markedly reluctant to share any further information with his friend, the Gossip Queen. The letch must have said something, she said, and in an unguarded moment the Fondled admitted that it was so. The moment the words were out of his mouth he looked horrified, because the Gossip Queen immediately wanted to know what had been said and he really, really didn't want to tell her. Over the course of ten minutes on the tube she threatened, she cajoled, she winkled and she coaxed, and just as the two stood to leave the tube the Fondled dithered. It was only a fraction of a second's worth of dither, but the Gossip Queen saw it and pounced like the professional she was. 'You'll feel better,' she urged him, making direct eye contact.

The Fondled was lost. 'Oh, all right,' he said in a tone of defeat, just as the doors opened and the pair were carried from sight.

There are eight million stories in the Greater London Area; this was the one I most wanted to hear the end of.

Bogus. Most, most bogus.





*For non-Brits, I should mention that 'the tube' refers to London's underground railway network, sometimes referred to as 'thundergrind'. Constructed by the Victorians, apparently entirely out of soot and pigeon crap, it is where English people go to apologize to each other. If you have never tried it, I recommend a visit to London purely to stand on someone's toes on purpose. They will apologize to you, I guarantee it.

** Shoes with painfully pointed toes. I mean, seriously. A health and safety violation on the tube, I would have thought.

***Ooh, I nearly forgot - Happy Hallowe'en, ladies!