Monday, February, 2020: Harry is depressed

As the train pulled away from the station, the ennui in the carriage was palpable. The sea of dreary faces was a sight to behold, and enough to tarnish the mood of even the happiest of campers. The first time you see this scene, you feel like you are not really a part of it; like you are different or better than everyone else on this train, because they all look so miserable, and you are so upbeat and happy. It confuses you and you sort of feel a little sorry for everyone there. Why are they so downbeat? No doubt they all have great reasons for looking that way. Who knows what is going on in their work or personal situations. You should give them the benefit of the doubt, and understand that they are, in most cases, maybe even great people to know, despite what their faces say. In any case, they won’t get you down. Because you are awesome. You are unstoppable. You are a force of nature, to be reckoned with, with dreams and aspirations, and willpower, and creativity, and a great sense of musical taste. Am I right? Give it a couple of years. These miserable faces start to reprogram you. They assimilate you. You become one of them.

Welcome to the London Underground. Also known as The Tube. The lifeline of one of the world’s busiest and oldest cities, supplying fresh and constant streams of people inwards in the morning, energised (despite the glum faces), oxygenated, ready to carry out their duties, and then sending them home drained, depleted, and miserable for the evening. Like blood vessels carrying haemoglobin, erythrocytes, and nutrients between their respective centres of operation. The muscles, the bones, the liver, St pancreas, the brain for the day and then back to the lungs for the night to recharge. In one of these vessels we find Harry.

Harry, as he would call himself today, had arrived early to the platform to secure his position in front of where he knew the train’s carriage doors would stop. Patiently he waited as he watched more people arriving and choosing their place to wait. This is a game of strategy and tactics. Harry knows where the exit is on the platform at his destination, so he chooses a carriage that will deliver him as close to that point as possible, thus securing his winning position and title for the morning: First person to leave the station! That is his strategy. His tactic for the moment must ensure that, as this is the end of the line, he achieves the morning’s greatest prize of all: a front-facing seat. The layout of these trains is designed to encourage this type of competitive thinking. You see, Harry can’t possibly sit next to another person with a front facing seat when there are a thousand side or back-facing seats with no adjacent commuters on which to impose his personal space. Not at this stage of the journey anyway. That comes later as the train starts to fill up when people have no choice but to sit next to each other or face backwards. No, for now it is a race and a mind game played with the other people on the platform. They don’t respect his right to his favourite seat just because he got there early. No. And this morning, Barry, as he would call himself tomorrow, had his personal space invaded on the platform by a local degenerate with thick, dark facial hair, and deep, hollow eye sockets, desperate to also win the front facing seat race.

The train pulled in. Looking through the windows, Harry could see crowds of school children, who would inevitably mess around and take their time leaving the train, making our race to the front facing seat more challenging. Programmed through constant visual and audible reminders, Larry (as he would call himself on Wednesday) knew that he should wait for the school kids to disembark the train before himself embarking. The doors opened. Gary (as he would call himself on Thursday) respectfully waited and looked on stunned as the hollow-eyed waste of carbon skirted in, past the alighting school kids, knocking one of them sideways, and aiming straight towards the chosen seat. Harry, as he was calling himself today, couldn’t believe the gall, the outright cheek and disrespect of this individual, who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. Harry tried to burst past the children and made a beeline for the seat, but his adversary was too slippery and cut him off at the point where for Harry to force his way in would have just been awkward and confrontational. Barry opted to sit in the front facing seat one row back, and stare into the back of this excuse-for-a-human’s head, imagining pushing his face into an un-flushed toilet until he nearly drowned. You see, it’s OK to imagine that kind of thing as long as you don’t actually do it. Or at least that’s what Harry thought.

About 30 minutes into today’s commute, and sitting next to Harry was a thin middle-aged man, perhaps in his early fifties. He had fallen asleep with his chin resting on his hand, so that his forearm was supporting the whole weight of his head, and his neck bent at a sharp angle. Apart from looking extremely uncomfortable, this also seemed a little risky to Harry, who wondered what the outcome might be if the train applied its brakes sharply. Would the man fly forward and injure the person in front of him? In the firing line for this potentiality was a young lad, who looked like he was barely out of his teens, and yet wearing a ring on his wedding finger. He was tapping away on an expensive-looking apple laptop, and balancing a cup of coffee on the side of the laptop near the trackpad. Surely this would also lead to some kind of disaster if the train were to brake suddenly. The youngster had some cheap head phones in his ears and was blasting out the latest release by The Bangles, a song named Hazy Shade of Winter, originally written and performed by Simon and Garfunkel in the Eighties. It is a great song, but this guy’s headphones were so loud and cheap that Harry’s ambience was noise-polluted by the high-pitched, tinny, rhythmical ringing. Maybe it would be mildly justified if this guy had a minor accident involving some coffee and his laptop. Oh well, it probably won’t happen. Or at least that’s what Harry thought.

Harry put his own headphones on to drown out the noise. On his new hits playlist was “Waiting for a Star to Fall”, by Boy Meets Girl. An annoyingly upbeat pop hit, which might just be enough to take the edge off of this morning’s events and the mood that he was now in.

A few rows down by the nearest set of doors was a man that stood out from the crowd to Harry, although no one else seemed to pay him much attention. He stood out for a few reasons. First, it was the middle of February, which is pretty cold by all accounts, yet this guy was wearing a t-shirt. No jacket or jumper in sight. The guy was also wearing dark sunglasses, and had a white walking stick, hinting that he was visually impaired. Even so, the direction of his stare appeared completely fixated on Harry the whole time, which even though the guy was blind, was still fairly unsettling. Harry stared back a while until the blind guy kind of pouted a little, almost as if blowing an antagonistic kiss at Harry. Harry turned his stare away as the train pulled up at Baker Street station. The doors opened and A few hundred people poured out, but not Harry as he had one more stop to go. The precariously sleeping man and the laptop guy also remained, as did the blind guy. He continued staring at Harry, right up until the doors beeped indicating their imminent closure at which point the blind guy moved like a fox towards them and slipped out just in time. He then proceeded to walk towards the exit, waving his white stick in front of himself, but moving with such speed and confidence that surely he cannot have been blind. As the train pulled out of the station into the tunnel, Harry could have sworn he saw for a split second that the blind guy standing facing into the carriages of the departing train from the platform.

On his way to the office, Harry stopped at his usual coffee shop. The barista looked at Harry with a level of disdain. Harry asked for a coconut latte. The barista asked for his name. “Harry”, replied Harry. The barista looked at him oddly for a moment and then wrote the name on the coffee cup. At that moment, someone at a nearby train station dropped their mobile phone onto the tracks and panicking, leaned over to try and grab it just as a train was pulling in. The train braked suddenly and a sleeping guy flew head first into the lap of young lad, spilling hot coffee all over his laptop. Harry didn’t know that this happened.