I'm not really one for daylogs, generally, but I just wanted to get this off my chest. I had the weirdest journey into work this morning.
It's always odd coming in really early - the underground is so empty compared to the rush hour. There's something a bit strange about all the trains still industriously chugging from station to station when the carriages are mostly empty.
Anyway, I'm sitting in my carriage, which I have all to myself, when I get the sense that someone's looking at me. I look up, and there's a guy in the next carriage, standing right up against the glass of the door. A bloke a bit older than me, clothes a bit of a mess, probably been out all night on a bender. Anyway, point is, he's looking right at me, which is a little creepy. I try to ignore it, but I do discreetly take off my headphones - whenever I feel vaguely threatened or uncomfortable or whatever I don't like to be without my sense of hearing.
So, I'm sitting there without my headphones, and he's standing there staring at me. Fine. I go back to reading my book (a collection of Groucho Marx's letters, incidentally - recommended). Anyway, the train slowly draws to a halt, inside a tunnel, and shuts off its engine. Happens all the time; just waiting for a train somewhere ahead. But, now the engine is off, I notice that he isn't just standing there looking at me. He's banging his head on the glass. Not like a mad beating or anything; just a slow, rhythmic banging. Bang. Bang. Bang. Still staring at me, or at least I think he is, because I'm trying not to look at him directly - I'm looking at his reflection in the window opposite. (I do this when I want to eye up women discreetly, too. I expect everyone does. I expect the women are watching my reflection eye them up.)
Anyway, just about the time I noticed this, the train started up again, and off we went. Eventually it arrived at King's Cross, where I change lines (despite the advice of a hundred notices). I left the train with all reasonable haste and strode off to the next platform without looking back, more as an exercise in self-control than anything. When I eventually got to my platform, I stopped, exhaled, and then casually looked around (who am I kidding?) but crazy head-banging guy was nowhere to be seen. There were a couple of other people on the platform, too, which dispelled the general feeling of creepiness, like it always does.
The next leg of the train journey passed without incident. All well and good. But now we come to strange event number two! As I walking from the tube station to my office, I have to cross a huge great road junction, which normally would be via subways, but they are all closed by building works. Anyway, as I was crossing I saw a girl, or a woman (couldn't really tell from that distance) right in the middle of the thing. Not on a crossing, but in the big grid boxed thing. She was just sort of shuffling slowly across the road, right through the main thoroughfare. If it were the rush hour there would be hundreds of cars queuing up to run her over but this early in the morning she wasn't in any immediate peril.
Being the good London citizen that I am, I, of course, ignored her completely, which I feel vaguely bad about now, but then it's not like she was lying in the road - she was actually heading towards safety, albeit slowly.
So, now I'm at work, here for this bloody conference call with some wretched small company whose proprieter apparently doesn't have time to sleep (bastard), and the phones don't bloody work! It baffles me that I can have a working 'net connection and yet the simple telephone network isn't reliable. On top of that, the other chap who's supposed to be in the conference call isn't even here, so my bizarre journey into work is looking like it's been for nothing.
You can see why I don't write these more often... I just ramble on and on and on and on...