Football pundit

There was a bloke on the tube this morning. He was probably 60 years old. He had bad teeth but he was rather cool looking with a shock of grey hair in a fashionable cut. He was wearing headphones and reading a magazine about music. It instantly became clear that he was fairly high on (probably) ecstasy. He was having a lovely time singing along to the music he was listening to, periodically shouting words of encouragement to the people in his ears. He was bordering on threatening and I was quite worried when a father with a young daughter got onto the tube and unwittingly sat next to him. The man decided to start talking to the young girl. She can only have been about two and had no idea what he was saying, but he was talking to her as though she were an adult, almost like she was another bloke down the pub. He drew her attention to his magazine and pointed at a picture, “he’s a ladies’ man, him. A real ladies’ man.” Then he asked her what she’d thought of the match. The sight of a sixty-year old man asking a two-year old girl whether she’d enjoyed the footie was too much for the rest of the carriage, who had one of those rare and rather lovely London moments when everyone started smiling and making eye contact. When the girl failed to proffer a suitable answer to his question, he retreated back into his headphones, stood up and gave a very excited match commentary as though he were a pundit on a football show: “he shoots! He scores! And it’s 3-2 to Tottenham. The crowd are on their feet...”

Only in London!