On the tube today (all extrapolated.)
There’s a girl in front of me, she keeps looking up at me. Some of the time she’s smiling, the other times she’s speaking in arabic (i presume). She must be about thirteen, fourteen. She’s probably half from an arabic country (there’s no way of knowing which, if you’re an uneducated westerner who can’t hear or understand you), and the other half of her, on account of her lightened skin is probably of mediterranean, or other european origin. She’s been on a journey from north london, down to the shopping malls of south west london. Her sister’s been silent all along, too engrossed in a past harry potter book, that exceeds her reading age by several years, according to government reccomendation. The mother’s tired, but proud of her daughters, happy somewhere inside, though this contentment barely shows.
Too my left is a group of tourists, from Austria, lead by an over-excited guide, who speaks near perfect english with an overheavy german/austrian accent, while wearing his purple belgian football shirt, (a team he doesn’t support, Anderlecht), including hte fact that he has no interest in the sport, and supports only one team in the country, judging from the dismayed looks of his party, an unpopular one, and supports the teams of every other country above this. The tourists are all attached to various London paraphenalia, anything from a bag screaming the word london, to that ever so simple t-shirt.
Further to the left, a few stops later, are two young girls, one blonde white girl, with speckled face, and a mixed race girl, who would appear to be her friend, from the way they talk amicably.
They all look happy.
But the others they don’t, the adults who aren’t occupied, who are alone, concentrating on some feature of the train, distraught by some misterious event.
Are you happy? every minute of every day?
2 years ago