Someone must have been paying attention lately, because shortly after writing the entry below apologising for my lack of updates, I was rewarded with not one, but two encounters with blog-worthy nutters. The first was the elderly lady sitting opposite Sal and myself on the tube on Saturday afternoon. At her feet, she had three or four plastic carrier bags containing copies of tabloid newspapers, which she proceeded to tear into small pieces and throw onto the floor of the train, as if the shredded remains of the Daily Mirror’s sports section would make a lovely carpet for us weary tube travellers. It did seem as if she was actually reading the paper before tearing it, though, and as she passed each word she would tear it off and throw it on the floor. Perhaps I should adopt this technique to stop Sal from nicking the magazine section the next time I sit down with Saturday’s Indie.
Our second nutter arrived much later, towards the end of our afternoon’s farewell drinking in Notting Hill. He was a greying middle aged American chap holding a stack of large printed sheets of his poetry, which detailed his views on everything from AIDS to love, marriage and the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. I could not quite work out if he was trying to sell his poetry, or just preaching, but he engaged us in one of the most baffling, incoherent conversations I’ve ever encountered. I couldn’t honestly tell you what he was actually trying to say at any given point–he jumped from subject to subject, talking in alternate sentences about copyright (“have you heard about the U2 case?”), Cat Stevens being refused entry to the US, and the absence of piano bars in the UK. Whatever my repeated affirmative responses everytime he asked “you know what I’m saying”? might have suggested, I actually had no idea. When we left he was standing outside the pub deep in conversation with the bouncers, passing poem after poem to them.