London Underground

By popular demand:

I was out for a friend's birthday party on Saturday night, and after the party broke up, sometime after midnight, I meandered down Oxford Street to Bond Street Tube station (pictured above) with friends who were in search of a kebab (http://www.naks.org.uk/about_detail.htm).

Once my friends had managed to get what they were after, I went into the Tube station. Now, it's a truth universally acknowledged that if you have partaken of an alcoholic beverage or two of a Saturday night, no matter what time it is when you finally turn up to the station, you will magically find yourself catching the last tube home. I suspect the government has hidden sensors which measure the alcohol levels in your blood as you walk down the street and plan the timing of the last trains accordingly. Being on the last tube is an experience. Usually people do not speak to each other on the Tube. But on a Saturday night, everyone talks to everyone. Between fragments of conversation with the people around me, I was reading David Copperfield. I was particularly amused by the following exchange: An English girl leaned over and asked me, 'what are you reading?' The people to my right were all French, with halting English. One of the French guys looked at the book and said 'Dickens'. The girl leaned in more closely, looking at my book, and said, 'No, he's reading David Copperfield!' The French guy just shrugged.