The Train

I got to the train station this morning and somebody was sitting in my seat.

Which is bad enough, and often enough to make me get off the train in a fit of disgust and wait for the next one (which is only ten minutes later), but I had to be in for a meeting this morning.

But worse, that person was Sean, and he knows that's my seat.

He knows.

[Sean and I often see one another on the train in the morning, but we have a kind of tacit understanding that we won't acknoweledge the other until we actually reach Liverpool St]

So I had to sit in a random seat.

And worse even than that, some completely mental Eastern European bloke got on at Edmonton and sat right next to me and insisted on talking to me all the way to Cambridge Heath.

Every time a train passed ours he'd smack me on the arm, get half up in his seat and say to me, 'Motherfucker, that's trains going faster!'

And I'd nod and agree that indeed that train was going faster than ours. 

Five times that happened.

Five. Times.