Nation gone mad (Thursday, Jul. 28, 2005)

Tragic as events of the last few weeks have been in London, we've suddenly been turned into a nation of jittery lunatics. Take my trip to London on Friday last week to go and watch England play against Australia at Lords cricket ground. There I am on the tube, with my big floppy hat and my...wait for it...rucksack minding my own business. Feeling a bit bored I put my rucksack down and walk down the carriage to pick up a discarded newspaper before returning to my seat. You should have seen the look on the face of the lady opposite, I thought she was going to explode whereas she clearly thought my rucksack was about to explode.

"How could you do that!" she screamed at me. "In this current climate don't you think that was an irresponsible thing to do?!". When I find myself in these situations I tend not to respond in quite the right way, and this was no exception. For some reason, I decided to gesture at throwing the rucksack to her as someone would a rugby ball, saying "here, catch!". It was wrong, and immature, and the woman was very upset so I feel pretty bad about it now. Her response was to go pale, then red, then to storm down the carriage - without her carrier bag! What could I do? I could hardly leave it there so I did the gentlemanly thing and chased after her with it.

Maybe I shouldn't have been running down a tube carriage but I was getting off next stop so didn't want to miss it. But there was no need for her to scream. Not wanting to get too close, I said "your bag" and dropped her bag near her, before running back to the door to get off. Not very smart. As I waited for the doors to open there was a rush of people from the carriage the woman had entered and some nervous, angry looks in my direction. When I looked back in the carriage, the woman was sitting curled up on a chair clutching her bag. All a bit dramatic.

So I handled the situation insensitively, but if this is how life is going to be lived from now on in London, I don't want to be part of it. 3 weeks ago, none of that would have happened, the young lady may even have complimented me on how nice my rucksack looked, as it was brand new and still had the tags on it. Or maybe she would have asked to have seen my new wall clock that was ticking loudly inside the bag, who knows...

And so it goes on. Yesterday the headlines were "man arrested carrying rucksack", and a poor Muslim chap was taken off a flight from Luton and quizzed for 2 hours because he 'looked' liked one of the suspected bombers. Let's just hope and pray that we don't all go insane with or without the threat of being bombed, if we reacted in this manner to every event, no-one would ever cross the road...

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