Lives overheard

One of the benefits of there being so many mobile phones around, is that you hear all sorts of tantalising titbits of conversation as you walk along the streets of a city.

In London the other day I caught:

“So you’re saying the watch I picked up wasn’t yours?”

Now, what could that be about? Did his friend send him back to the office to collect the watch he’d left on a desk, and he’d taken someone else’s, meaning he now had two colleagues lamenting the loss of a timepiece?

Or it could be worse than that. Maybe he went back to the café where his friend had left his watch, saw one, collected it and shot back out thinking he was doing his friend a favour, only to discover that he’d taken the watch of an innocent customer who’d only just removed the watch from his wrist to rest it. That customer had since reported the theft to the police, providing them with an excellent description of the culprit, further reinforced by crystal-clear security camera footage.

I did hear a siren approaching as I went past, so I moved away quickly rather than witness the arrest of an unfortunate individual, guilty only of good if misdirected intentions.

Only to walk around the corner and hear a young woman, striding up Exhibition Road, proclaiming loudly:

“You can throw me under a tube.”

For those possibly not familiar with London, the tube is the underground railway that criss-crosses the city. To be thrown under one would not be a life-enhancing experience.

The usual expression is ‘throw me under a bus’...

...but under a tube would be more certainly terminal

So what terrible catastrophe had overtaken her? Had she been denied promotion by a scheming colleague who had secured a post, by rights hers, and whom she was now challenging to finish her life altogether, since he had already irreparably damaged her career prospects?

Or was she talking to her now ex-boyfriend, who had dumped her for her sister, heaping humiliation on top of harm? Bereft even of family support, since she had already been abandoned by her parents for her terrible choice of lover, she had now been betrayed by her own sibling.

Indeed, she might have been talking to the very sister. No wonder she felt that being thrown under a train would be a perfectly reasonable next step in the progression of disasters afflicting her.

But I think the finest titbit I overhead came from an anxious young man saying:

“You mean, he saw me leaving this morning?”

Well, I could construct some plausible circumstances that might lead to that kind of statement. But is it worth it? I’m sure you can find your own easily enough. And they probably wouldn’t be very different from any conjecture I might come up with.

Ubiquitous mobile phones? At least they add spice to a stroll through London. And a little exercise for the imagination.