Public Inconvenience
A big railway station in London at 9.11pm last night. I’d had a couple of pints after work, and as per usual, arrived at the station needing the toilet. I decide not to use the one on platforms 5 and 6, but the one on platforms 1 and 2 instead.
I walked in and there was predictably a queue. Gosh, and wasn’t it slow moving. Unlike the 5/6 toilet. Ho hum. Someone looked over at me. He was at the urinal. I realised my recently bought cheese and onion pasty was quite smelly. I looked sheepish and broke his gaze. Still no movement in the queue though. Then the guy next to him looked over at me. My pasty doesn’t smell that bad does it? Maybe it does. It has strong cheese and onion flavour and so now I’m now officially paranoid.
Then a small, much older man shuffles over to the hand dryer. He’s taking an age. He’s also now standing exactly in front of my neutral gazing point. I can’t look there, so I start to look around the toilet more. Suddenly a few things drop into place. It’s like a Truman Show toilet. Superficially, here were a lot of commuters relieving themselves, washing hands, using the cubicles.
But they weren’t really. The gents at the urinals weren’t doing that furtive things that people doing their business do, as they’re acutely uncomfortable with the idea of using a shared urinal space. There was no muscle twitchiness in buttocks, no adjustment of weight from leg to leg. And there were lots of people with really short hair. Shaved hair. Crew cuts. Looking good.
It was, of course, a cottage. I made my exit realising that a urinal would not become free. As I walked along the platform, I saw more crew cutted men heading that way.
And why is this here? Well, I didn’t see anything (for which I am grateful). And lets avoid the Brown Wedge shall we? And their behaviour certainly wasn’t sporting, as I was bloody desperate for the lav. I had to wait until the train arrived and I’m sick at looking at Edward bloody Pond’s Severndroog Castle.
It’s the first time I’d ever known of a place be a cottage, and certainly the first one I stumbled in on. Was it a random happening? Did a text message go out telling people the time and the place (and whatever happened to that programme? Is Mike Scott the leader of the European Republic in another dimension?) Will it be there tomorrow? If you want to find out, why not contact me and I shall tell you which station in return for donations to our Grecian Earn appeal. I’ve read about the pink pound.