The good and the bad of my week – observations in transit

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The Good

A lunchtime walk through quiet dormitory suburbs. A young boy and his grandmother walk towards me. He can’t be more than two or three and she is doing what grandparents do, describing in excited tones what their afternoon together holds as long as he promises to be very good.

I might have spotted them in a crowd, without seeing them, but vividly alone against a background of hedges and brickwork, they drag me back almost 60 years, to when I too felt like the centre of everyone’s world; protected and nurtured, my potential a source of endless joy to those around me.

This sudden recall is so powerful that I look over my shoulder after we’ve passed, not once but twice.

The Bad

Home on the bus for the weekend. Two twentysomething glorified alley cats park themselves in front of me, denizens of the call centres that seem to abound around my own workplace.

It transpires one of them has been taking team-building exercises much further than his HR department might wish, with a female colleague who’s not his full-time partner. They had apparently wasted little time on formal introductions.

This strikes a chord with his smirking friend, who’s happy to divulge his own track record in this area – the deceit, the discovery, the eventual reconciliation with his aggrieved girlfriend and how they “both laugh about it now”.

In a post-shame world, all of this gets aired at normal conversational volume, regardless of the fellow passengers who surround them, as if they were discussing going off-road in a hire car, in breach of the rental agreement.

“Feel any remorse?” one of them asks, and the ensuing chucklefest confirms my suspicion that the question was rhetorical.

When this really gets interesting, is when we disembark in town, and go our respective ways. For convention says this is the point at which a lament for lost youth should kick in, and I should glumly reflect on how tame my weekend will be compared to theirs.

Instead, and to my surprise, I feel a certain elation. I am at least going somewhere where the air may well be fresher and cleaner than wherever it is they’re off to.