Vodka Swillers on the Train

July 2006

On the train from Darlington to London I got chatting to a couple, she over six feet tall and he a little chap of perhaps five-feet-two with long straggly hair and glasses, these two having joined the train at Glasgow at seven in the morning, we becoming a part of the theatre at ten in Darlington. They were on their way to a concert in Hyde Park, and had got through their first or maybe second bottle of Vodka before the train passed Stevenage. The woman in particular extremely friendly, telling us the names of the bands that would be playing, which meant absolutely nothing to us.

At one point the woman went off to the buffet, leaving her small-of-stature friend drinking vodka by himself, and after a few minutes he suddenly began shouting, I thought at first at me for looking at him, but I think his ire was directed at two teenage boys sitting in the foursome opposite us, whom he imagined to be laughing at him, or poking fun at him. Or it may have been me, for I did look in his direction now and again, as one might. The two boys were a bit worried and tried to look suitably abashed, but at length the tall lady came back and after a few kind words to him he settled down. She wanted to know whether they’d be allowed to smoke at the concert, as smoking in public places is now banned in Scotland, and I said that I thought they probably would, or at least it wouldn’t yet be against the law. And she told us about her children, who she’d left in Glasgow while she went to the concert with her boyfriend. We must know the bands, didn’t we know these bands?