Why builders and the tube don't mix
01 January 2008 - Lee Krawczyk
About four weeks ago, I arrived for the tube at Angel station and suddenly found myself strutting along the southbound Northern Line platform to Billy Ocean’s ‘Get out of My Dreams – Get in to My Car. The fact that this song was even on my iPod is questionable to say the least but the real cause for concern was my complete inability to stand still. It dawned on me that whenever an up-tempo little number began playing on my Nano I simply had to dance. Okay, not dance as such, but perhaps offer a little shuffle, a funky walk or some over-exuberant foot tapping. Naturally, I blamed all of this on the boogie but conceded that it was perhaps time to stop using my iPod on the tube for fear of being twatted in the face or signed up to a boy band (I’d be the slightly older, out of shape member that the mums liked).
Thirty two days later though and I’ve been given no choice but to take a drastic u-turn - all for one very good reason: I am a magnet to every mental that the London underground has to offer. People I would ordinarily ignore. People who make travelling on the tube a total sodding nightmare.
The thing with London is that everyone loves the tube, even if they say they don’t. Yes, it’s a nightmare for overcrowding. You always seem to be wedged under the armpit of some fat fella who clearly works as a butcher. Yes, you are often confronted with a gaggle of wage-boasting city boys wearing more cologne than the male population of Greece. And yes, if you get offered one more London Lite in the space of 15 metres you’re going to shove it up some poor Albanian vendors recycling hole. If you all hate it so much though, why are you so quick to brag to me about your knowledge of it? “Oh you’re going to Canary Wharf?” people will ask me as I set-off to meet my sister after work. “Well what you should do is catch the Northern Line to London Bridge, jump on the Jubilee to Who the Fuck Cares station, change at Aren’t I so Brilliant Because I know All of This Junction and then get the DLR to ‘The Wharf’.” At this point some other idiot will inevitably step in offering me their thoughts on a better route by which time I’m already there having made the trip a million times before and because of this thing they invented years ago called the ‘Tube Map’.
On my last trip to Canary Wharf I managed to grab a seat early on but, with no iPod, had to just sit there keeping myself amused. Immediately I became transfixed on the state of the girls feet opposite me – not in a foot fetish way I might add - but because she’d decided to wear flip-flops to work. Her feet were now blacker than the finger nails of a 19th Century chimney sweep. I was quite surprised by this as most city girls these days tend to wear those weight-loss trainers that make them walk like they’ve got gout. Next to her was a man so large that his arse filled almost two seats and whose suit looked like a leotard. More amazingly, he was asleep with a copy of a self-help book called ‘Awaken the Giant Within’ rested on one of his breasts. I really wanted to point the irony of this out to old Black Feet but by now she was far too busy reading the ‘Lovestruck’ section in the London Paper in the hope that somebody had left her a message. Perhaps I should have texted one in myself. ‘You were the brown haired girl sat opposite me at Bank last Tuesday afternoon. I was the lad in the white shirt who kept staring at your feet. We made brief eye-contact when you caught me. Fancy taking a foot-bath sometime?’
With no one to talk to though, I remained quiet and contented with my own thoughts. Until, that was, the builder got on and sat next to me. Now, the reason I knew he was a builder was because his tracksuit bottoms were coated in all manner of paint, plaster and tomato ketchup. Plus it was 4:30pm and he was drunk. Strangely, he was also carrying a bunch of really shit supermarket flowers. Tesco Value Roses for £1.99 or some such.
“Faaaaaaaackin hell mate what a day!” he immediately blurted out. “I’ve been at work since 7am but left early to ‘av a few jars with the boys. My bird is ganna go faaackin nuts as I’m meant to be taking her out for dinner later. Nightmare!” After a brief chat it turns out that he’d bought the flowers as a peace offering, an optimistic gesture in my opinion considering he hadn’t been home the previous night either as he got ‘mullered’ in East Ham and shagged a petrol station worker called Sharon he'd met in The Walkabout. “So what do you do mate?” he then asked me, “You don’t look like one of those city ponces!” I explained my job to him as quickly as I could. “A faaackin magazine journalist! What like all those lad’s mags with tits and cars? Brilliant! I faaackin love all that shit!”
As we chatted a bit more about my job, the fact I was single, and how dirty the girl he’d pulled the night before was, he suddenly looked up, paused for breath, and spotted my old friend Black Feet. “Now THAT is a good looking bird right there!” he shouted at full volume and barely two metres away from her. All I could think at this point was ‘Oh fuck.’ “Oi darlin, what do you think of my mate here then? He’s a good looking lad. You’re a good looking girl? What d’you reckon?” By now I was completely mortified. “If I was single I’d be all over ‘that’” he told everyone, "But I’ve got a wife and kid to get ‘ome to!” A kid! Jesus Christ! This guy was a total bastard. At this stage the tube carriage was rammed and Black Feet was doing all she could to ignore me and my new best mate. What could I do though? Everyone now assumed that me and Gob the Builder were life-long chums. How could I make it look as though I was in no way connected to him? “Ah bollocks! I’ve got to get off at the next stop,” he declared, saving me from finding the solution and ending my agony. As he got up to leave Black Feet remained seated, meaning I’d have at least one more stop to either cry with shame or mumble an apology. “Faaackin hell I never even asked your name mate!” Gob enquired as he left. Stupidly I told him. “You’re faaackin jokin aren’t yer? Lee’s my faackin name too!”
Brilliant.
After Lee had left (having told me his email address so we could meet up for a few ‘jars’ in the future) all eyes were now firmly fixed on my big red face. I made my apology to Black Feet in my best Hugh Grant voice – even making some pathetic quip about how me and Gob shared the same name. “No worries,” she said, I see tossers like that on the tube all the time.” However, what I heard was, “No worries. You’re a complete twat.” After that I got off two stops early, deeply ashamed of the torment I’d inadvertently put this poor girl through in front of so many strangers. I vowed to track her down one day and make it all up to her.
I'll start by getting her a nice foot scrub.
