While walking through the tunnel towards the east-bound circle line train at Paddington this morning, I could see a train in the distance with it’s doors open. At first I wondered which side of the platform it was on, but noticed a young man staring out of the open door towards meunless something had gone very wrong indeed, I can never remember the doors on trains opening out towards the tracks.
With several hundred people in the tunnel between myself and the train, I resigned myself to missing it. Drawing closer, everybody in front of me obviously went through the same emotions, and as the chances of “making it” rose, a dawdle turned into a brisk walk, and then into a run.
Everybody made it. Unfortunately everybody made it in time to stand on the same train for ten minutes without it moving. “We apologise for the late running of this train. This is due to a safety alert on the train in front of us at Edgeware Road”. Several people around me started cursing, and I wondered how they would feel if it had been a bomb and people had been killed.
Finally the train pulled away, and I found myself hanging from the railings in the middle of the carriage with my messenger bag pinned between my feet. Due to the number of passengers, reading my book was out of the question, so I just tried to keep out of everybody elses way.
While hanging there, I noticed a young woman facing the door, engrossed in one of those magazines filled with celebrity news and photographs. I wasn’t aware that anybody ever actually bought them - this proved that they indeed do, and without knowing the young woman I mentally disregarded her.
Having lost interest in her, I took notice of the Japanese gentleman stood directly in front of me. It seemed strange that in such warm weather he was wearing a long (very smart) black coat. I peered over his shoulder at what he was reading, and found several pages of Japanese text. Interestingly (to me) I realised he was looking at a Microsoft Outlook email. Even with most of the wording on the page translated into Japanese, my brain figured out what it was.
While looking at the front page with it’s maze of Kanji characters, I wondered about fonts, keyboards and all sorts of other issues surrounding non-latin character sets. Then I noticed that one part of the email was in plain Englishhis name.
Hiro Nakamura.
If you have seen the first series of Heroes (probably the best series I have seen in many years), you will understand the title of this post”Nobody Will Ever Believe Me”. In Heroes, a Japanese character called Hiro Nakamura appears to Peter Petrelli on an underground train after warping space and time to deliver a warning to him about the future.
The Japanese gentleman didn’t turn around and tell me “Save the cheerleader, save the world”, so I’m assuming either that he wasn’t “the” Hiro Nakamura, or his time hasn’t come yet.
And there I was wondering what to write about this morning.
Blogged with Flock