Last Monday I had cause to be working in Glasgow, in a theatre just south of the Clyde. At the end of the day, I planned to take a train back to the city centre. I arrived at the station ten minutes after someone had committed suicide, jumping onto the tracks. The police and ambulance had arrived moments before me, and had not yet been able to remove the body. He lay there, lifeless and nameless like a mannequin. All last week I searched all the news media for an account of what happened, but there was nothing.

With no chance of a train, the tube was a better option, and I was soon in the city centre once more. Just outside Queen Street station, I met a man with a red face and no teeth selling the Big Issue magazine. The magazine was giving away some free post-cards, so I bought his last copy. I had intended to send a postcard to some friends I had stayed with over the weekend, but they turned out to be a promotional pack for Amnesty International, who are running a campaign of awareness of domestic violence. Did you know that on average a woman is assaulted 35 times before she seeks help from outside authorities, and that every day two women are killed by a current or former partner?

Not for the first time, a doctor friend was telling me today about the evidence of domestic abuse she sees in hospital. She told me stories of young women who conceal pregancies from violent partners or disapproving parents. Others manage to live for months without even realising they are pregnant. They arrive in the hospital with pains, and despite not menstruating and the appearance of a huge, baby shaped lump in their abdomen, they insist that they cannot be pregnant. They only have to wait a month before unwelcome contractions prove them wrong.

Surely the biological facts of the matter are so obvious as to be unmistakeable? Apparently not, said my friend. For social or religious reasons, some live in denial, scared to admit even to themselves a fact that would bring shame upon them. Others have a more clinical mind-block, a psycological refusal to see the truth in a manner similar to anorexia.

I think these are relevant digressions, because they are all examples of someone so far removed from our own daily lives, that they could be living in another country. And yet we all live in the same country. Men so sad they will jump in front of a train; men without teeth or a roof over their heads; women suffering and dying in silence, unnoticed; and girls so illiterate they do not understand what will happen if they have unprotected sex. I am reminded of a passage in Fergal Keane’s book A Stranger’s Eye (2000), where talks of the ‘submerged’, people, those whose lives are so far removed from the rest of the country, that they seem to no longer understand us, nor we them:

For a few weeks in a Leeds courtroom, the story of her life and death illuminated a parellel universe in which young men, women and children lived not so much on the wrong side of the tracks, but far below the surface of the nation. Submerged. The majority did not end up killing or engaging in senseless violence, nor could they in any sense be said to inhabit the same moral universe as those who murdered Anglea Pearce.

But they did live in a submerged world. It was there all around us, in every city in the country, a world of unexplained departures and missed connections, a great, quiet tradgedy that went stalking down the generations. When it spilled onto our front pages – a child dead from neglect or cruelty, a frightening drug statistic – we took notice, we were shocked. But the waves always closed over and the underwater silence resumed.

I really don’t know what all the fuss was about.
Say five people go to a weekend music festival together. At various times during the weekend, they pay for groceries and travel expenses. R pays £3 for margerine, £3 for electricity, totalling £6. L pays £17.50 for some groceries. E spends £10 in the shop and another £2 for some communal painkillers to ease hangovers, a total of £12. K spends £7.50 on groceries and £6 on electricity cards, which totals £13.50. S pays for car hire at £113 for the weekend, then £18 for parking, £15 on petrol, and £54 on groceries, a total of £200 exactly.
That means we’ve spent £249 in total, or £49.80 each.
If S has paid £200 but owes £49.80, she is due £150.20 from the other four. However, K and E foolishly gave her £3 each, and R has already handed over £5 early in the proceedings, so really S only needs £139.20. Since K has already spent £13.50, he should contribute another £36.30, £3 of which he has already paid. £33.30 is still due. Since E has paid £12 already, plus another £3 to S, only £34.80 of her £49.80 share is due. Likewise, L has already paid £17.50 of his equal share, so he still needs to pay £32.30. R has only made purchases of £6, but since he has already paid £5 to S he now owes £38.80 to the group.
Since S is owed money, the other four should pay her back. £139.20 divided by four is £34.80 owed to S by each of the other members. By luck, this is exactly what E owed to the group anyway, so now both S and E are ‘quits’ with the group. This just leaves K, L and R. Since K only owed £33.30 in the first place, his paying over £34.80 to S leaves him £1.50 short. By a similar calculation, L only owed £32.30, so paying £34.80 to S left him £2.50 out of pocket. All is not lost however, because although R owed a total of £38.80 to the group, he only paid S £34.80 of that sum. R therefore has £4 outstanding to the group, which K and L can split between them.
To summarize, everyone pays S £34.80, and R pays supplements of £1.50 to K and £2.50 to L. Simple.

Cartoon by Sidney Harris.

We’re cruising at 36,000 feet, the two o’clock EasyJet flight back to Edinburgh. The flight is smooth, the cloud-speckled landscape beautiful, and I am suddenly a festering, miserable bastard.
Over the tannoy, the pre-pubescent ‘Flight Customer Services Representative’ (or whatever the stewards call themselves these days) invades my airspace with adverts for Harry Potter Top Trumps. Not any old Top Trumps, by the way, but the very latest Goblet of Fire editon. You simply cannot get these in the shops. You can also buy the perfume endorsed by Sarah Jessica Parker…
As with departure lounges, in-flight shops are so insidious because there really is no escape. You cannot ring the bell, ask to get off, then simply get the next pplane, five minutes later. The steward’s voice makes it worse: not because the camp mockney accent contrasts so starkly with the refined tones of the RP you still hear on other airlines; but because he is simply inarticulate and crass. “Stick this in yer gob, you’ll love it!”. Proper diction and a sense of decorum should not be commodities that can be cut back.
When you book with a low cost airline, you should not expect all the frills. The lack of free coffee and snacks has even been expunged from the BMI flights too, so the dry and barren atmosphere is not a bother. But there is a difference between being given no extras, and being subjected to the constant onslaught of Opportunities To Buy. If this stealth commerce is the only way EasyJet can compete, then they could at least do me the courtesy of not wishing me a peaceful flight at the plane takes off. With the drone of the cabin crew’s constant sales patter, peace and quiet is clearly not high on their agenda.
Now, if they had the wit to tell a few jokes or sing a song, they might win their way back to my heart. Writing in The Independent, John Walsh laments the disappearance of bus conductors, now the old Routemasters have been all but phased out in London. We read of the conductors acting as bouncers, bodyguards, rappers, crooners and other entertainers, and even lectures on ettiquette! On the bus, there was no need to pay a premium – these unexpected extras were provided free as part of the ‘no frills’ service. And with an old Routemaster Bus, you could jump on and off the back if you needed to escape. Now the bendy buses are snaking their way through London, bus passengers are yet another imprisoned market for crass, on-board advertising opportunities. Watch this space.