Fuddland
Okay, maybe I managed to get a little bit drunk last night, evinced by the bruise on my left thigh. I was at Victoria Station and in need of relieving myself, so sought out the station’s public toilets. Due to severe inflation since the first use of the phrase “to spend a penny”, you now need to pay twenty pence [with either a single coin or two ten-penny pieces] to get through the turnstile.
At these turnstiles I found a man carefully looking through the change in his hand—it was obvious he hadn’t the right coinage. Luckily I had two shiny twenty-pence pieces, so I offered one of them to him out of the enormous kindness of my heart. The man was very grateful and insisted he gave me as close to twenty pence as he could: a ten-pence piece, a five, a tuppence and a penny. Except as he dropped each coin individually into my hand, they slipped through my fingers and onto the floor. We did a little bobbing-up-and-down dance to the tune of “I’ll just pick them—oh, okay, you do it—oh, right, you thought I was going to get them—ah, but now you’re letting me” before he went through the turnstile to attend to his business.
After he’d gone through I popped my remaining coin into the slot but somehow—and this is hard to do on purpose—I managed to push the rotating barrier without actually passing my body through, catching my thigh on the end of one of the steel prongs. Still on the wrong side of the barrier, I checked my change: no twenty pence pieces left, no two-tens. I didn’t hold out much hope of someone else performing a random act of kindness as I stood there, so I just leapt the barrier—I was at that special level of drunkenness where I could leap over a four-foot gate without a problem, but walking through in the normal way was beyond me.
Comments
Vicky | 2004 / 03 / 23 – 16:31
With beer I am invincible!
Phil | 2004 / 03 / 23 – 23:59
That reminds me of a totally unrelated experience I had whilst at Victoria station once. It was late evening and I was waiting for my train on the main concourse. Some guy comes up and asks me if I can give him the money he needs for train fair. I said no, I didn’t have any spare money. He then goes on to tell me how he’s just got out of prison. He’d been in prison for a stretch for GBH. He’d basically seriously damaged a guy who’d beaten up his daughter. After this long story (he was a lot more detailed, especially about the nature of the injuries he inflicted) he once again asked me if I had any money I could give him for train fair. I just said that I didn’t have any spare money 10 minutes ago, and that hasn’t changed in any way over the past 10 minutes, sorry. With that he just said “OK mate, thanks anyway” and wandered off. I’m sure he was trying to intimidate me and, had the station been a lot emptier I may well have been, and ended up giving him the money.
Daisy | 2004 / 03 / 24 – 16:52
I think I’ve told you this before but no-one said I had to be original - the best grafitti I ever saw was in the (ladies) toilets at Victoria. Someone had scrawled “I hate homos” across the back of the door. Underneath someone had added “Have you tried taramasala?”. Heh, heh, heh.
Jez | 2004 / 03 / 24 – 17:23
Re: comment no. 2.
That bloke span exactly the same yarn to me at Victoria once. Although he certainly looked frightening and I can well believe he was in prison for GBH, I gave him nothing either.
David | 2004 / 03 / 24 – 20:30
Re #2 & #4: And if any of us meet this bloke in the future, all we have to do is give him either of your names and addresses, and he’ll quit bugging us too. ;)
mrtn | 2004 / 03 / 25 – 06:09
re #5: or, if you’re really brave, just stop him at the start of his spiel: “excuse me, we both know you’re only telling me this story to make yourself appear scary and intimidate me into giving you money the second time you ask, so why don’t we just save ourselves the time by realising that i’m not going to give you any money, leaving me to get on with finding my train in peace and leaving you to move on to the next, less well-informed and presumably unsuspecting person…”
hm, maybe that needs a bit of work ;)
David | 2004 / 03 / 25 – 11:05
Re #6: Yeah, I think we need to make that shorter. Might be hard to say the second half of it inbetween spitting out blood and broken teeth. ;)
Commenting Closed
Commenting on this post is closed. Thanks to all those who left comments. If you'd still like to say something about this entry, feel free to email me.
