The poor guy next to me on the train down to King’s Cross this afternoon was tormented by the drop-down tray in front of him. There wasn’t a latch to keep it up against the seat in front, so about a minute after he’d pop it back up it would fall down again and rap his knees.
In the end he left it down, but he was a tall man and his knees were considerably higher than mine. Having been ground down by the tray, his soul crushed (as well as his knees), the man’s only option was to sleep. The tray couldn’t hurt him in his dreams.
In the moment, you don’t really think of solutions (because there was one, and it was a fairly simple one at that, of me offering to swap places as my knees were safely below the tray line).
But I was still getting over an injustice of my own earlier when the heavens opened and I got drenched by rain and hail (it’s June!) on my short walk to the station. It literally began raining when I locked the door behind me and stopped when I stepped onto the train. As we rolled out of the station, the sun climbed out from behind a big black cloud, which just melted away, and blazed down as if the rain had never happened.
When things happen so precisely like that, it does make you wonder if there’s a higher power at work. You’d think this higher power would rather torment political psychopaths than wind me up, but maybe I’ve underestimated how important I am. Or maybe the political psychopaths have somehow nobbled the higher power, which would be just typical of them.
I also lost the rubber bit on one of my ear buds on the train, so I had to listen to other people’s phone conversations instead of my music. I don’t like to take phone calls on busy trains, but others appear to relish it. One man boasted of eating a banana just before bed and still sleeping like a log, another ‘accidentally’ electrocuted a horse.
What am I doing with my life?