TUNNEL VISION

Londoners are perhaps never more so than on their daily tube journey.

On entering an empty carriage, newcomers target the seats at its extreme ends, a strategy meaning that only one side of each individual risks physical contact with another person, the other being boxed off by the non-flesh, glass partition or solid end shelf.

I too strive to maintain my separateness. I sit, mind in the Aegean (a beloved spot on one of the larger Cycladic islands), bottom on the bald burgundy cushion cover of the Hammersmith & City line and wonder if each of my not so fellow passengers is housed in a small, impenetrable world.

A woman sitting opposite me posts a small square of milk chocolate into her mouth and makes a vigorous action of rubbing and cleaning her fingers, hands outstretched, as if to dissociate herself from the eating. It is vaguely irritating.

Someone I can't see is battling with a mobile.

I put on my make-up. Is doing this acceptable? In a recent newspaper article its author mourned the loss of mystery that has seen women frowning into small square mirrors, fluorescent mascara wands in hand, in the public arena of the London Underground. I applaud mystery and on the occasions when I have risked eyelash curling, have wondered whether this risks ‘too much information’, but mystique has been a necessary casualty of my early alarm. 'Women should just get up 10 minutes earlier', instructed the writer. Well, 'no'.

As the pink line passes from media to finance, the satchel journalese bags are fewer and the recently shampooed heads of the city boys are many. They rarely look up. I often fall in love on the tube. There is ample time for it.

My free paper tells me that someone 'with tastes entirely compatible with my own' could be opposite me, now, the way to him being a simple matter of a two way ‘app’ on our mobile phones. It seems, equipped with this mutual technology, we would recognize each other. I don’t think the man I am looking at needs apps.

Stance is everything on the underground. For pre-accepted intervals we duck and wedge ourselves in the knowledge that for those 20 minutes we will be nearer to another’s armpit than is likely to be a choice. We see pores up close, are forced to overhear conversations about how ‘Sandra is doing my head in’ and we hold our collective breath.

Within this, however, the ‘same book’ instance runs as a gentle thread. The second novel of a cult trilogy is balanced on my lap. The first in the series is in the hands of the man two seats down. It's the boy wizard all over again and can be called a phenomenon. I adjust the way I am sitting so that the title of my book is visible. It produces a shy smile and I am saddened for the late Swedish author who cannot know how he populates the Hammersmith & City line.

My upward glance lands on a poster. A London university that could change your life, another asking that you change it yourself, a third letting you know of the natural disaster whose duration matches your journey time. ‘By the time you’ve reached…..another…..will have contracted..’. There is the journey you are making and the many you are not. I am at a lonely moment in things, 43 and seeing ‘ahead’ unpunctuated by what people call life events. On a second glance I think I will give the charity a call.

My neighbour is now reading my paper, by stealth, over my shoulder. I offer it to her. “No”, she says, “thank you, but don’t you find it leaves print all over your fingers?”.