BEFORETASTE
There is a queue. It’s long. They are all waiting for their full fat morning coffee. They’re drooling as it takes a while to make good coffee. They look agitated. The ones who have their drink are in a moment. Then they leave. Miserable as ever. It’s the aftertaste. It wasn’t as good as they’d hoped. And they still fall for it every day. It’s a slow torture. And expensive as 2.30 x 5 x 52 = £598 testifies. If only they could stop at the drool.
THE LAST PERSON OFF THE TRAIN
All journeys can be enjoyable, even the commute. The way to nullify pain and multiply pleasure with any given form of travel is to let everybody else leave the train, bus, plane, car, tram or camel first. In other words, be the last one off your given mode of transport. This turns the journey into a form of destination and can lower your heart rate by 37% before you hot-foot off to wherever you’re meant to be next, which is never quite as much of a hurry as you assume. If rush hour had pedestrian speed limits and we were all wired up to a giant pacemaker, the hour itself would only last 52 minutes, leaving 8 minutes to put your immediate world to rights. Some may think this idealist, and they’d be right. But if idealism took root, as everyone would deeply love it to, we’d end up upset as we’d have nothing to whinge about. Now I’m confused.
Help.
THE TRUTH ABOUT STAIRS
The people you meet on a staircase when there is an escalator or lift available are the people who change your life.
NOBEL PRIZE FOR LISTENING (# 74,933)
Prize-winning authors are two a penny.
Prize-giving authors are a rarer breed. Imagine, for a second, Salman Rushdie handing out awards to everyone who made it through Midnight’s Children. Or Madonna presenting rosettes to every child who didn’t demand their money back. These are two over-documented easy targets and for that I apologize. In fact, I just punched myself in the face. Criticism is the cancer of literature. It eats away at the bone marrow of storytelling. Yet when it’s favourable, us readers lap it up like crystal meth, or Nesquik, depending on your palate.
Prize-winning listeners are the ones that hold the world, and all its composite little worlds, together. To listen and be able to edit out the diamond from the quartz is a skill that isn’t taught as all the teachers are too busy yakking.
Like me.
I stop and listen.
Birds are going bananas outside.
Bloody hell, they sound lovely.
EYES OF A SAVIOUR
On every platform, at either end, hundreds of feet below the streets, he took a photograph on his phone of the oncoming train and the glare in the driver’s face. Years later his work would exonerate the key figure in the world’s worst ever transport disaster and so change the human rights of passengers for evermore.