Friday 14th February, 2003. 22:23 train
from Liverpool Street to Chingford
Being a Friday night the trains carry blind-drunk commuters from the heart of the city to their houses in the suburbs. I chose a friendly-looking carriage to hide in the corner of, just wanting an easy ride. Typically, as the doors were closing a group of four blind-drunk men and a blind-drunk woman got on and thought they'd sit in the same section as me. As the train pulled out of the station the woman stood up, climbed onto the seat, onto the back of the seat and amazingly hauled herself into the overhead luggage rack. No mean feat she then delivered the most free-flowing monologue about how she was demonstrating how easy it was for asylum seekers to get into our country, about how all they had to do was hide in a luggage rack. Answering the collective hysteria she induced without us having to say anything she said if we wanted to know why she was blind-drunk it was because she'd just been paid and that she was an honest worker and taxpayer, paying for the asylum-seeking bastards. She worked for the sales department of The Guardian newspaper, not doing anything interesting, just making the money for the paper to be published and voted for James Goldsmith's UK Independence Party before he died of cancer.