THE MAN WITH THE FLOWERS

It had been a long day, but, by some miracle, I'd made the unlikely train connection with seconds to spare and, as I dozed off, the train rattled on, stopping at the final few stops which separated me from my car and, eventually, home…

We pulled in at a station and, as I looked up, from my viewpoint, I happened to notice the head of a shortish, middle-aged man just popping up over the top of the seats as he waited for the train to stop, and for the person in front of him to press the button to release the doors, and I idly wondered for a moment, what it was like to go through life being him.

I worked my way briefly through the potted life history I'd instantly created for him, made loads of assumptions about his resentments about getting older, and being short, and not having been overly blessed with good looks or charm, and I decided that this was probably not someone with whom I would want to mess, and decided to turn my head away again to stare at the reflections in the window beside me.

And then...

As the doors opened and the people shifted, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before.

The fact that he was carrying a bunch of flowers in that slightly awkward and embarrassed manner that gentlemen of a certain age can have when it comes to publicly being seen to handle such things, especially when they're carrying other bags and stuff and have to try and stand up on a train without falling over when they've run out of free hands to cling on with.

Still, he and his flowers managed to disembark reasonably unscathed and, as they headed off into the darkness of a chilly winter's evening, I began to wonder a little more about this little man and his flowers.

It had been, as I said, a long day, and, if you're lucky and it's not yet a time when the thing is full of drunks,  those later-evening local trains really don't offer much in the way of distractions other than pondering upon the lives of your fellow and former-fellow passengers.

So, given that it was 8.15 on a Monday evening, a full four days before that date with Saint Valentine which normally adds to the quota of people self-consciously carrying bunches of flowers about with them, my perception of this stranger and his life had completely changed, and I began wondering even more about him and his lot in life.

Where, I wondered, was he going to?

Was it a date, or an apology?

Was he a widow heading out hopefully in search of new romances? Or was he just apologising for being late home? Did he live with someone whom he loved desperately and always brought home flowers for? Or was it someone who terrified him so much that he thought buying a few flowers might help ease an awkward situation?

So many possibilities, and I've barely scratched the surface.

Maybe, in the tradition of the first of several tragic ends for the character of "Dirty Den" on TV all those years ago, he was an assassin, disguising his preferred weapon of choice amongst the blooms, and on his way to make a "hit"...? This seems rather unlikely, I suppose, given that the train had stopped in a quiet, leafy suburb, in which I have not since heard of any sudden violent murders on the local news, and that he would have to wait at least an hour for his "getaway train" after doing the deed, which doesn't strike me as being the best of escape plans for a professional hit-man to have.

Obviously I'm never going to know, of course, well, not unless I happen to run into the chap again  in some unlikely future set of circumstances, become an acquaintance, and actually take the trouble to find out more about his life, all of which is probably very unlikely given that I've already pretty much forgotten what he looked like anyway, (and might be very dangerous if he did happen to turn out to be the latter).

Names, I struggle to recall.

Faces, I'm even worse with, which, given that my life is rather built around visual stimuli, is rather surprising, I suppose.

It's people, you see. They seldom catch my attention for long enough for me to take an interest, which is one of the reasons why I occasionally try mental exercises like this one, in order to help me improve my memory when it comes to the people who I actually do know.

Sort of...

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this entire, rather pointless, non-encounter, was that it took me quite some considerable time to realise that 8:15 wasn't really all that late in the evening and, just because I'm quite often thinking about heading up to bed at about that time, other people still consider such an hour early enough to still consider going out for the night, and might make bookings for restaurants, or just head out to the pub far later than I seem to be able to imagine possible.

Lifestyles change, and I'm sure that my inner worlds must seem just as odd to the outsider as everyone else's seems to be to me, but at least I took the time to pay some albeit scant attention to one of my fellow travellers that night, wheras I can't think that any of them even noticed I was there as I flitted through my own life like a ghost in the night...