Walking to Asda. A revelation.
Walked to Asda this morning – nothing against Asda but tend to avoid it owing to the fact that the journey entails cutting beneath a railway bridge that is the home to half a billion pigeons, which I don’t think is an exaggeration if you look at the amount of accumulated shit on the narrow path (inches deep at some points) and the number of flattened feathery carcasses on the road.
Have I mentioned my antipathy to pigeons? I may have.
One of the few positives of the Coronavirus lock down is that you meet very few people on the streets, and those you do happen upon tend to be hyper-aware of your existence and give you a wide berth.
Just before the Nisa on Hall Lane I chanced to encounter three young women in deep conversation. The path is narrow there. The three young women occupied all the available pedestrian space. Their attention was sharply focused on their own conversation and not on where they were going.
In normal times the only choice of a solitary human being encountering such a solid line of determined conversationalists would be simply to slip over to the road and into the line of oncoming traffic, where you would have less chance of a collision – motorists at least tend to look where they are going. Most of the time this is what I’d do.
Occasionally I have tried to hold my ground, and when the chatty horde comes within arms length I have raised my voice and said something like, “I am big enough to see!” Which I think is an objective statement and cannot be interpreted as threatening in any way.
But it’s not only collective path blockers who normally behave this way. Up until very recently many people navigated the streets by mental intuition, their five senses occupied by iTunes, iPhones, iPlayers and so forth. They seemed to believe that it was perfectly fine to franchise out their sensory equipment and environmental awareness to the rest of us while they focused entirely upon the contents of their iPod shuffle, serene in their faith that the rest of us would be careful not to trample them down like the stupid insects they were.
I have often wondered what they thought the rest of us did when they ploughed towards us on a narrow path beside a busy road, completely oblivious to our presence.
Maybe we would bound over them in a single leap.
Happen we’d jump to the nearest windowsill or balcony and hang there till the danger had passed. Pretty sure I’ve seen that move in a Spiderman film.
Perhaps they thought we simply disappeared in a puff of smoke? (I really don’t think they believe the rest of us are in fact real.)
Perhaps they believed that we were in possession of some kind of futuristic time and space warping device and we’d fade out like a member of the Star Trek Enterprise and reappear six feet behind them and five seconds in the past?
Or maybe they thought we were actually two dimensional beings and would simply turn sideways and slip by them like shadows on the wall.
I’ve often wondered about stranger things as people have walked right into me, completely unaware of the world around them, seeing other people as simply an obstacle, or a glitch in their matrix.
But that didn’t happen today.
I didn’t get within ten feet of my fellow pedestrians, forced to share the same space, equal beings in our joint social and material universe, when the young women stopped talking, signalled for me to take the left side of the path, and instantaneously rearranged into a synchronised dart formation… impressive.
There is hope yet.