Unleash the Bats

I don't imagine any of you wondered where I was... I don't for one minute suppose anyone thought "Hmm, Old Springheel's oddly quiet. Perhaps he's poorly. Perhaps (God Forbid) he's dead!"... No. I doubt it. You just kept on with your pitiful, meaningless lives, little remarking the absence of pitiful, meaningless Springheel. And this is how it should be. We are, after all, nothing but dust.

But I am not dead. Not yet. And I have returned from my ethereal absence refreshed, invigorated, and full of spleen.

I shall restrict myself to two topics tonight. The first is the news that my skull is now repaired and there is no internal leakage (although I cannot be sure that aliens do not come in the small hours and tap my cerebral fluids as well as my dreams).

This cure, officially announced last week by Her Majesty's National Health Service, has clearly caused unconfined joy chez Springheel and prayers of thanksgiving have been spontaneously offered across the country (although the country in question was Iran). Your kind words of support and comfort have, of course, been conspicuous by their absence. But it doesn't matter...Your sympathy would have meant nothing to me in any case. Your pitiful earthling emotions are beneath me now.

So I turn to my second text of the evening. One of the few pleasures of living in a squalid and irredeemably vulgar city like London is that it has a vast range of cripples, freaks and lunatics to provide entertainment. Those of you offended by that remark might pause to consider that I certainly fall, on a fairly regular basis, within one of those categories (i.e.cripple) and the way I am going, I can state with some confidence that I am likely to achieve two of them before Death has the kindness to come for me.

But I digress. I recently had the pleasure of encountering a vocal lunatic on the tube and although it was an interesting event I shall nevertheless contrive to render my account of it tedious . I find it entertaining and that's what matters, after all.

Picture the scene - a hot, humid, crowded tube train, grinding home on a weekday evening. Unusually, your intrepid correspondent had secured a seat and was chuckling to himself over a copy of Cursed from Birth - the short, unhappy life of William S. Burroughs Jr. The tube halted at a station and a considerable number of people got on, including a quite pretty young blonde girl and an older woman who was just behind her. As we rumbled off, I heard a woman speaking - unusual in the funereal silence of the tube, where we try (as any Londoner will tell you) to maintain a clear and inviolable boundary around our own private hells.

I looked up and the older woman was talking to the blonde. Perhaps, I thought, they work together. I returned to my book. Then I heard the phrase "You're shit! Shit! You're shit!" repeated. I looked up and saw that the older woman appeared to be berating the blonde. As we got to the next station, the blonde took advantage of the general migration toward the platform to escape down the carriage. Foolishly, she did not actually move to another carriage. this showed a fatal underestimation of the application and pluck of the British lunatic.

I looked round and noted an empty seat. As did the madwoman.

The seat was next to me.

And so she sat by me and continued to sporadically express her contempt for the blonde, who was apparently copying Madonna and nothing but shit. The interesting thing was that the madwoman was getting progressively louder, and more irate, and more uncontrolled. Soon she was absolutely yelling...This was tasty...

By this time she was actually leaning across me to shout up the carriage - and she was degenerating fast. Her speech was slurring, her face lolled vacantly inbetween outbursts, she muttered and twitched and began to drool slightly.

This was the critical moment. I looked at her, leaning over my legs to shout. I looked at the drool collecting on her lower lip. I looked at the impeccable grey pinstriped lightweight worsted of my suit...I looked back at the madwoman, and she saw me staring. For a moment, we locked eyes. And then she sat back quietly.

The train pulled into the station and, although I had two stops to go, I stood up, smiled at her, and swept out.

I have no objection to public lunacy, but I'm damned if I'm having some gibbering bedlamite drool on my newest suit.