Excuse me, is that your bag?
Phew! Made it into work and no one tried to blow me up.
What a strange journey though. Never have I been in a train carriage with so many people on edge. Even mention the word terrorist and I reckon every last one of us would have tried to jump out the windows. The fact that you’d actually only be able to fit a 12 inch pepperoni pizza out of any of these windows wouldn’t have put any of us off, not even a little bit.
Everyone, including myself, was looking from side to side out of the corners of their eyes at every bag more than 15.5 cm away from a commuter. I think the only thing relieving the tension a little was the very scary picture of Steve Jobs on the cover of MacUser that I was reading. I imagine that the fact that I was reading a copy of MacUser made everyone think that if we did all get blown to little bits then at least they weren’t the biggest looser on the train.
So my 3/4 empty carriage did have a man on it with a massive bag above his head. I thought this was kind of odd since there were so many free seats he could of just stuck it on the seat on front of him. Also noticing that several other pairs of eyes seemed to be flicking back and forth between their copy of the morning newspaper and said bag with as much attention as would be given to a Wimbledon final…I leaned over taped the gentleman on the shoulder and asked him if it was his bag. He turned around, smiled as if he kind of expected it and said it was. I said something stupid like “Well you can’t be too careful these days” and the tension in the carriage lowered to DEFCON 3.
I think we’re just going to have to get used to doing this sort of thing. I think everyone there actually found it pretty funny in the end.
What we should do: get people really into bag fashion so that people won’t mind you asking them if its their bag. Quite the opposite: “Excuse me is that your bag” Response: “It certainly is! Its Prada you know. I got it in the sales.” And there are lots of polite ways to ask people…
“Oooh that’s a nice bag…is it yours?”
“Wow what a co-incidence I happen to own the same bag as that. Who’s is it!”
If you can think of any more than add a comments…
Tags: london, explosion, blog, blasts, london bomb blasts
July 7th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
[…] The comming months were to be pretty difficult times for Londoners. The atmosphere on the daily commute was seriously tense for many weeks and I know of several friends that were routinely stopped by police and searched simply becasuse of the colour of their skin. One friend was stopped so many times by police wearing machine guns that he temporarily moved back to Australia. […]