Life is in the Details.

A woe be-trodden man sits across from me on an unusually empty Bakerloo Line train. Its that time in the morning when most people have just sat down at their desk ready to start their days work.

This man is unusual. He is wearing a navy blue suit, black shirt, black tie. However these all are filthy. The left breast and collar of his blazer are coated in a yellowish, powdery filth. His hair is a mess. Bedraggled, grey and too-long. He doesn't look like he has brushed his hair since it was last cut, which by the length looks to be over a year ago. He is carrying a significantly sizable stack of different newspapers, an old paperback and a Mars bar. Intermittently pinching he bridge of his nose with his forefingers. He seems agitated and despondent in equal measure. After fidgeting with the wrapper and hand placing his weather beaten, unshaven face in his hands a while longer he opens the Mars bar with a flurry and casts the wrapper off with some vigor. It flutters into the air and his attention is then focused on he chocolate bar which he devours, holding it delicately, but adoringly; the resulting impression us that he us caressing it softly as he consumes it, much the way a baby grips and fondles their mothers breast whilst feeding.

Once the chocolate bar is sliding down his gullet, his attention turns to the top newspaper of his excessive pile. He unfolds it clearing his throat, and begins to peruse the monochrome pages. He is more distracted from this than he was his chocolate bar. Glancing up and down the carriage around him. Looking anxious and withered in his old age. His eyes so woeful and bloodshot, a basset hound longing to be let in out of the cold, begging silently at the garden door. He looks pitiful. As he glances around I hope he doesn't realise that I am writing about him. I am sure he does not; he seems entirely engrossed with his own unusual, seemingly sorrowful activities.

 ~*~

What is this man's story? His suit and expensive (but muck splattered) looking boots spoke of former respectability. Perhaps he was once a noteworthy academic, a lecturer. From the generation where it was the societal norm for a wife to do her husbands washing and 'mother' a man into his old age. Perhaps his dutiful wide had died some time back and he no longer knew how to look after himself. Perhaps he had become befuddled in his grief. Perhaps he had once held down a very respectable job in the city, and had seen a woeful decline into senility. Perhaps he had lost that high-flying job and his wife had left him because she couldn't handle the strain of watching the man she knew and loved fade away in front of her, perhaps she couldn't handle the strain of caring for him more and more as his faculties failed him and he recognises her less and less. Perhaps he was never married! Perhaps he was homosexual, perhaps he had no interest in romance or starting a family. Perhaps he has never done anything noteworthy in his entire life. Perhaps he is a tortured genius, or the force behind modern politics. Perhaps he lived a life as selfless and courageous as Nelson Mandela. Perhaps he was a daemon, an un-discovered serial killer, who will become the most notorious since Jack the Ripper. (Perhaps until very recently he had been a popular tabloid journalist until his newspaper was shut down and amid facing allegations of illegal journalistic malpractice had lost his mind and had a never sharp decline into what I saw today.) Who he was, why he was that way and how he came to appear so unusual I (we) will never know.

He is just one of hundreds of people who pass us by every day, who I encounter in this vast urban metropolis I call home. For the most part one can only get a glimpse. The way people present them selves is like a window into who they are, and a snippet of their story. Everyone has a story. Every thing has a story, every object, every stone, every garment, every piece of discarded waste has a story. My part of His story ended at Paddington station.

 

The End

London Transport Encounters Part I