The Morning Commute

Unlike my last job, my new job is a Monday to Friday, nine-to-five kind of affair. I live a couple of miles away from my work, and, as I'm too damned mean to shell out for bus fares, I have a little trip there and back on Shank's pony every day.

Hoofing it up the pavements day in and day out, I'm always surprised when I see the same faces every day in roughly the same place. Not being a great one for enthusiastically relinquishing the comforts of my bed (personally I believe that all "morning people" should be either shot or sent back whatever planet they came from in the first place), I'm often slightly tardy in getting out of my front door of a morning - scarily, I've found I can judge almost exactly how late for work I'm going to be by the exact point at which I encounter a familiar face.

It's strange - I've got friends who I see less of than these daily moving milestones, but it seems to be an unwritten rule that even exchanging a nod with these characters who play regular bit parts in my life is not the done thing. So (because the walk to work would otherwise be fairly dull), I resorted to making up back stories for them just to make my life seem a little more interesting.

There's a Victorian hypnotist - seven feet tall if he's an inch, and with a waxed black moustache that's so impressive it cuts through the crowds like bullbars on an SUV - if I pass him before I pass the college building, then I'm only going to be five minutes late. I try not to catch his eye.

A little further on, I encounter the Eskimo dissident. He always looks slightly furtive, and smells of fish. He fled his icy home and has been leaking secrets ever since. Lately, his twin brother has been sent over here to track him down and drag him back to Igloo HQ - there's a lot of bad blood in that family, and a personal vendetta that has nothing to do with Eskimo state security, but the twin brother had a score to settle and if he can do it with the backing of the Eskimo secret service, so much the better. Admittedly, it could have just been the same guy wearing a different jacket one day, but the look in his eyes told a different story.

Then there's the Major. He's always on his way to the Central Library, striding past me in a puff of tweed and an intruiging cumulo-nimbus of bygone facial hair. I like the Major. You can tell he was tall, once. Regular as clockwork, he marches down to the library, battered briefcase in hand. I always make way for him - once I think he even aimed a half-nod in my direction. In his briefcase he has the almost-disintegrating military files of a couple of his old comrades who didn't survive the war he came through unscathed - worse, their reputations have been tarnished, and that's something he can't stand for. But the Major is an honorable man - they were his men, and he still feels a duty to them.

And, perhaps most strangely of all, at lunchtimes there's a Lollipop man I walk past who's the spitting image of Pete Postlethwaite and has a child's mitten attached to the non-business end of his sign. Like some kind of trophy. I don't like to ponder on that too deeply.