Our journey to the station of about 3 miles, was spent dodging people parked at junctions, others cutting across to your side of the road as they turned in. Some thought crawling along then just stopping was fun. We encountered at least six people driving surely under the influence of prescription drugs, which as we know is not illegal, but is probably the biggest cause of car accidents. Most of the traffic was going to retail parks, which had long queues.
Self-evidently we both set out yesterday expecting random acts of bum crackery, and were amply rewarded. We got on the Manchester train. Spare seats had bags on the them, people not wanting to suffer the indignity of sharing ‘their’ space’ with a fellow traveller. We sat down. Anne was entertained by a young woman crunching her way through a bag of crisps, swilling down a bottle of teeth-rotting poison in between.
My companion had two mobile phones going off alternately, and he kept calm by dragging on an electronic cigarette. One side of the nearest door exit had a bloke sprawled over four items of his luggage, his foot hanging across the gangway. When the train pulled up at our station, he realised the door he was leaning against was about to open. In a flurry of slow motion, he moved his ‘stuff,’ finally waking up to the fact other people were on the train.
As we made our way out of the station, people were blocking platform entrances, knowing the railway staffs’ inability to answer their loud, pointless questions would bring the heavens down.
We got to our destination, Piccadilly hotel. We sat through 2½ hours of fascinating, inspiring and potentially world-changing material presented by Michael Tellinger. We were surrounded by people fully awake, tuned into the moment and prepared to help turn this world of f*** you, greed and fear into what it was designed to be, paradise. Ubuntu is the word.
Now we had our internal reality re-aligned, the train journey back was incident-free, as was the journey to our local Asian restaurant.
But fear not, this tale has an unhappy ending.
Three women sat behind us. One clearly had a ‘heart of gold’, as she and her slightly drunk, angelic associates kept telling us. The heart of gold was also engaged when she continuously talked over the angels’ attempts to educate other diners about house cleaning, holidays and drinking. Except her ‘talking’ could have raised the dead, such was its volume. But so meaningless, trivial and repetitive were her utterances, that the dead would have preferred continued slumber, despite one of the other angel's attempts to get a word in by raising her onw volume.
Thank God for contributionism. It will be our salvation.