Bank Holiday Sardines

GNER train
An overfull service from Kings Cross to Edinburgh yesterday.
Despite the fact we were packed like sardines in a tin, I found the journey passed quite quickly. Probably something to do with everyone being in the same situation, which breeds a certain camaraderie. One kind family from Portsmouth even shared their chapattis with the other passengers.

11 Replies to “Bank Holiday Sardines”

  1. Actually, they were Aloo Ge Paratis if we’re going to be picky. It was an ice-cream tub full of them. At least fifteen adults got some, I reckon.
    There was also a party of Australians who offered me a vodka and coke, and I had a big bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, but neither offering really caught the public’s imagination in the same way as the paratis/chappatis.
    Yes, the loaves and the fishes parable captures the atmsophere perfectly.

  2. For gods sake Rob this Muslim love-in gets a bit tiresome – don’t you ever get fed up of being so self-conciously bloody nice about everyone all the time ? Why would chappatis catch anyones imagination anyway ? They’re hardly cutting edge world cuisine – always the thing left behind when the rest of the buffets gone.
    How about this as a being nice to minorities story – I was stuck on a train once and a gypsy played me a tune on a tin whistle in exchange for a cigarette – I was in first class and it was a surreal and slightly embarrasing experience, especially as being england no one said anything until he lit the cigarette !
    You’d probably love the Paris metro too where various dregs and loonies randomly board trains, read out a prepared sob story and then go through the train – sometimes playing apalling folk music on a casette player – collecting money. A bit like “steaming” on the London tube but with gallic charm rather than ethnic thuggery.

  3. Matt, you do make me LOL. I don’t think they were Muslim. If they had been, I could have crow-barred something about multiculturalism in there too. But believe me, when the competition is a 500g bar of plain Cadbury’s chocolate, pharatas/chappatis definitely do capture the imagination of a bunch of pissed-off long-distance commuters with aching knees.

  4. Now the cuisine doesn’t bother me – I would have preferred to be listening into their life stories. On the Tube, I do get a bit irritated with the mobile phone users but to allay my irritation, I try to imagine the other side of the conversation – does anyone else do this or is it not PC or will no-one own up to doing it?

  5. Belive it or not I’m considered sufficiently important at work to be entitled to it, the gypsy asked for a cigarette, I initially said no, so he said he’d play me a tune for it, before I could refuse he started playing and it seemed churlish not to give him a smoke after that.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.