On the move

I sometimes write these blog entries while out and about. It can be a good excuse to get myself out of my flat with the flimsy excuse that I'll be doing something productive. To be fair, if I stayed at home I'd probably have found something else to be distracted by. 

I'm writing this one while sitting on an Overground train, specifically the Windrush Line as it has recently been rebranded. It's a longish journey between Highbury & Islington and Forest Hill so I'm hoping to get something written. Writing on public transport used to make me self-conscious as it involved a notebook and a pen and I worried it would draw unwanted attention. Nowadays however everyone's on their phone all the time so writing on one doesn't appear out of the ordinary.

In ye olde times, the Circle line was still a circle and you could ride around on it all day, treating it like a shrieking, rattling overheated office. It was often much more entertaining than a real office, with a wide variety of characters dropping in and out at every stop. On one occasion, I was attempting to rescue the plot of a short story I'd clumsily driven into a dull conclusion when a notorious actor stumbled into my carriage. I won't say who it was for legal reasons, but at the time they had recently been sacked from EastEnders after the Daily Express photographed them punching a guide dog. It had been quite a scandal at the time, although if one good thing came from it, it's that nobody has punched a guide dog since. 

The dog-puncher had clearly been having a busy day, and collapsed theatrically into the seat opposite me. The man in the adjacent seat gave him a look of revulsion before getting up and moving to the other end of the carriage. 

"Everyone's a fucking critic," the actor drawled unoriginally.

I glanced at him warily.

"If you don't like my lines, write me better ones," he complained. 

"Sorry," I replied, glancing at my notebook guiltily. "I was distracted by the blood on your knuckles."

His right hand was balled into a tight fist and his knuckles were indeed capped with crusted blood. 

"Don't worry," he said. "It wasn't a real dog this time."

"What?" I had clearly missed my calling as a prime-time interviewer.

He flexed the fingers of his wounded hand and grimaced. "It was a fucking Banksy."

"You swear a lot," I said, stating the obvious. 

"And whose fault is that?"

I imagined it was his, much like it was his fault he'd punched a guide dog. But then he was an actor. Maybe he was following someone else's script? 

"Why did you thump that dog?" I asked indignantly, hoping to turn my conversational fortunes around. 

He looked at me with disgust. "The Express couldn't pay me enough to tell them, so why the fuck am I going to tell some nobody on the tube for nothing?"

"I thought that maybe the burden was eating you alive and that's why you're drunk at one in the afternoon."

He glowered at me and deliberately pulled a bottle of cheap red wine from within his coat without breaking eye contact. 

"Okay then," I said, changing tack, "why did you punch the Banksy?"

"Thought it was a guide dog." He unscrewed his wine and gulped from it with feverish urgency. "To be fair I was blind drunk."

The train pulled up at Euston Square and to my horror and astonishment a blind woman and her guide dog got on board. The actor wiped his mouth with his coast sleeve and fixed the dog with an evil look. The dog regarded him warily.

"Please," I said, "don't punch that guide dog."

"What?" The blind woman said. She was panicking. "Is someone going to hurt my Ludo?" She looked uncertainly in my direction.

The actor grinned at me and said nothing.

"There's a man opposite me with a history of attacking guide dogs," I stated.

The blind woman backed away from me. "Leave me alone!" she shouted, turning this way and that in the hope that she was retreating from her would-be attacker.

A broad smile on his face, the actor dragged himself out of his seat using one of the carriage's hand poles. He then lurched out of the beeping doors just before they closed.

At the same time a barrel of a man with a bullet for a head had risen from his seat and approached the blind woman. "Everything okay love?" he asked.

The train juddered into motion and the woman managed to hook her arm around the central pole. "I need a seat and I think someone wants to attack my dog!" she said breathlessly.

"You what?" said the bullet-headed man, his temples instantly throbbing. He got up and took the woman's arm. "Here, you can have my seat." 

"It's all right," I called across the carriage to the woman in a way I hoped was reassuring. "The dog puncher got off the train."

The bullet-headed man glared at me. "Leave her alone you weirdo," he said angrily. He lowered his gaze to my open notebook. "What you doing writing on the tube anyway? It's not natural."

I closed the notebook and got off at the next stop.

Looking back on this incident, it's clear that the world has improved in some respects. I can now write on my phone anywhere without it appearing out of the ordinary. The Circle line is no longer a circle though, and now spirals out to Hammersmith, a failed orbit if ever there was one. As for the dog puncher, he briefly resurfaced on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! but failed to win the audience over when he joked that every unpleasant item of food he had to eat tasted like roast Labrador.