Making connections

A friendly face. A smile. A warm sparkle in the eyes, saying that all is well. How often do you see that? Honestly? And when was the last time you saw it on the face of someone you'd never met , had no cause to interact with, and were never likely to see again?

I have been lucky enough to experience this today. In - of all places - London. I hate London. Out of principle. It can't possibly be right to presume that things will function sensibly when so many people live in one place. Of course they don't - they live in a whole load of places that they pretend is one place, but all of which really have their own quite distinct locality. But still, there's very little space between people. Lots of place, and not so much space. No breathing room. No air to breathe, hardly. And so they try desperately to separate off from the other people: there's no real space between us... I'd better make some.

Londoners, I swear (or maybe just suspect...) would watch someone choke to death on a bus before asking them if they were ok. This is why I'm happy I'm a Northerner. I'm not really, of course: Oxford, if I'm honest. Then lots of south-west. Then lots more Oxford. But I wouldn't live south of Birmingham again if you paid me. So I have converted to Northernerism. Yeugh. - Southerners. Rude; ignorant; humourless. And all of them in one place - London. Why am I here?! Home tomorrow, all is well!

At least this is what I maintained for the majority of the journey here. I took the tube from Euston - commuters, most of them terribly precise and efficiently trying to get back as quickly as possible to their hermetically-sealed IKEA-showroom flat. Who cares if you're here, you're just in the way, especially with that bag... And then I picked up the bus from Finsbury Park. It's a bus I've caught several times before, and it's always pretty painless. Today, it was joyful. I was sad, for various reasons, one of which being that I was in London (the sadness of that fact is more complex than I can be bothered with tonight). I was drowning my sorrows in Alison Moyet's Voice. And then I looked down at the boy in the buggy next to me. Maybe he was 18 months? Probably not quite. Beautiful - lovely dark brown skin, and shiny eyes to match, and gleaming they were for his mum, sitting next to him playing with his hand. He looked up at me, and reached out for my hand, which I gladly gave him. He had the best laugh - that proper belly laugh you only really hear from children. And I held his little hand, played with it, hid it and revealed it, and he kept on smiling and laughing at me, periodically checking with his mum, all the way to my stop. Just before I left him, I complimented him on his friendly manner and urged him to hold on to it, rare a quality as it is, all over this Godforsaken country of ours, and most acutely in our great capital, the streets paved with gold and then covered in shit.

Mostly here, or at least what seems mostly in recent months and years, strangers connect only in sadness. Deaths. Anniversaries of deaths. 9/11. 7/7. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Thousands killed, millions mourning. The nation brought together in grief.

But why do we have to wait for sadness to be with each other? It makes that connection so false, in a way...too temporary. The country joined together...did it? Londoners displayed great resolve...did they? They all went back to normal as quickly as they could - great resolve, maybe, or perhaps a desperation for the comfort of the normality of insularity. And why, really, do we have to wait for anything to be happy to be with each other? I am here, and you are here, and that's a good thing. I am pleased to share this journey with you. I don't propose anything idiotic, anything that might upset the smooth running of things, heavens no! But would it really be so dangerous if I smiled at someone on the bus, offered a friendly face with absolutely no conditions attached to it?