The Great Race

If there were a points system for bad karma, one item you might find near the bottom, among the minor misdemeanours is ... running for the train when you don't actually know it's coming.

I don't mean where you hear the whistle and dash across the platform to elegantly slip between the closing doors; I mean when you're merely approaching the station and you respond to that feeling that maybe the train is coming. You begin to walk faster -- shuffle-step, step-shuffle -- and the people around you suspect that maybe you know the timetable better than they do. Involuntarily they start shuffling too. And soon you've got barely restrained commuter panic on your hands with people walking Olympic style, bursting through turnstiles and dashing up stairs. And you're actually puffing and sweating when you get to the platform and see ... the train is not even there yet. Sorry to say this but Sydney is the kind of city that makes you do it.

On my morning commute I've started seeing one middle-aged lady quite frequently. She lives in my street, gets on at my bus stop and catches the same train as me. I notice her because of the way she hurries all the time. In fact she looks like she might be Latin American and if she did come from somewhere like Bogota -- where you don't run for the bus because there is no timetable, and no specific bus stop -- I figure she can't have always been like this. I want to stop her and ask, when did it begin? Or even better, I'd like to get some footage of how she walked whenever she first arrived and put it next to some current footage as a kind of 'before' and 'after'. And I want to vow that if Lesly ever ends up hurrying around like that then we will leave this city immediately.

I haven't seen many of the morning train people lately, but I saw 'the man with the lump on his head' this morning, and he is now 'the man who used to have a lump on his head'. That's right, it's gone, with not so much as a band-aid to mark the spot. How? There's another question I will never have the answer to.