Very strange being on the tube yesterday, after all this. Even when the tube is packed, there’s normally a very careful sense of space around each person; a preserved isolation. People don’t make a lot of eye contact on the tube and a lot of the time they don’t chat to each other on the tube; the noise from the carriages drowns out the conversations. It’s a very different experience from being a bus; there, you catch snippets of a life from an overheard mobile phone conversation, a chat between people sitting next to each other. You can see lives at each stop; people coming in and out of shops, running to get to the bus stop on time…
The tube, on the other hand, is strangely suspended from all that. Little dark capsule of relief from all the complications of life up above. Little dark capsule of relief from a city full of other people. On the tube, you’re normally alone with your own thoughts.
But yesterday was very different. Lots of eye contact. You knew – or thought you had a very good idea – what everyone was thinking of, if not what they made of it. I don’t think anyone knows what to make of it.
The Wired Jester 