Since I only have to be in London for an afternoon meeting,
I treat myself to a later start. This
turns out to be a bad move. Mid-morning
trains, I discover, are far more stressful than rush-hour ones.
On an early train, bleary-eyed commuters sit checking their
emails and falling asleep. The only
sounds are a gentle tapping, some snoring and a bit of dribbling. Once the train reaches Paddington, the
dribbling commuters snap to attention, clear the train in seconds and hurl
themselves at the exit barriers like pinballs.
What I’m saying is: they do not hang around. They know why they’re there, and they Get On
With It.
But the mid-morning train is a magnet for meanderers and
ditherers. These are people who think it
is acceptable to spend five minutes deciding where to sit, another five
deciding where to put their baggage, and a further five, at the carriage door,
deciding whether to leave the train properly or not. It is not acceptable. Not even remotely. When you reach the carriage door, you go
through it. And when you are through it,
you get out of the way so that other people can also go through it. That’s how doors work. And while we are at it, the same thing
applies when you reach the top of an escalator, because otherwise you will have
an escalator-full of people up your backside.
This is not rocket science. Concentrate, you stupid people! Stop
talking and concentrate!
At 11 o’clock the train manager asks us to observe a
two-minute silence in honour of the fallen.
Hurrah! At last the Welsh ladies
in the seats opposite, of whom there are about 150 at a guess, fall quiet. The meanderers sit still. The ditherers desist. And there is an exquisite, if brief, oasis of
tranquillity. The Welsh ladies go purple
with the effort to contain themselves.
My afternoon meeting, when I eventually get to it, is for the oral proceedings
course. It is our final final planning
meeting, and we are still working on our auxiliary requests for the mock hearings
on Friday. It feels just like preparing
for real oral proceedings.
One of the tutors is wearing an extremely lurid tie. He says he put it on specially for me,
because I made comments earlier in the year about his two-and-a-half-piece
Lycra® cycling suit, from which he infers a lack of sartorial expertise that
only a barrister in a day-glo tie can rectify.
Well I hope he doesn’t wear that tie in his day job: it would probably
justify additional damages.
No comments:
Post a Comment