Attack of the black-eye telescopes

I was in the lift a few days ago - going out to lunch - when a man got on who looked like the victim of a practical joke. He had a large black smear on his forehead, it looked like the sort of stain you might get from wiping your brow after replacing a laser printer toner cartridge. It also made me think of my old comics in which every issue always had a story that included some humourous japes with a black-eye telescope

I stood there looking at this poor unfortunate, about to step out into busy Manhattan not realising he'd smeared toner on himself.

"An American would tell him", I said to myself, "they would say, 'Excuse me, you have a mark' and he would thank them. Because he's in a lift with an Englishman that won't happen."

"If I told him, I would be taking a step towards one of the American traits I find admirable", I thought. Then I did nothing for a bit and we reached the ground floor and went our separate ways.

Five minutes later I saw a woman with a grey cross smeared on her forehead. Then a few minutes later two more people with grey/black blobs. My keen mind began to sense a pattern. By the end of the day I'd counted more than 20 similarly daubed faces.

It turns out that on Ash Wednesday Christians smear ash on their foreheads. I never knew that. Looking back, I can't recall ever noticing anyone do that in the UK. I've never seen it mentioned on British TV or news, it is completely new to me. This suggests either it rarely happens in Britain or I am woefully unobservant. I'm putting it down to the practicing nature of American Christians, compared with their British counterparts. English Christians (and by that I mean the people who when asked what religion they are, respond, "Church of England") mostly see their religion as something inherent within them. Something they were born with, like their pancreas. They don't really know what it's for, they don't think about it more than twice a year, but they know it's inside them somewhere.

Train Nomads

Although I've yet to get on a train carriage that was full, they are sufficiently full to breach your personal privacy threshold. The layout is three seats, then the aisle, then two seats, like this:

--- --

And they tend to fill up like this:

O-- --
O-- -O
O-O -O
O-O OO

At this point the carriage is 80% full and the three-width seats all have the middle seat empty. No-one has a fellow passenger on both sides. This is the privacy threshold and this is when the train nomads appear. The train pulls out of the station and a few seconds later people starting entering the carriage through the vestibule, passing through and out the other side. At first I thought they were people who had jumped on at the last moment, and were working their way to the empty section, but there are too many of them for that and they pass in both directions. They are The Wanderers. They roam the train looking for a row with two empty seats, preferring their journey within a journey to having to sit between two strangers.

And thanks to them, there are more empty seats.