Irrational hatred? It's normal!

Each and every day, I develop a deep and irrational hatred for at least one of my fellow commuters.

I don’t think I am alone in this; I see other people staring with baleful looks at certain individuals for a wide variety of reasons.

Today, it was a young woman with a permanent case of the sniffs. She was well dressed, immaculately made up and reading an ‘intelligent’ magazine (The Economist, if you must know). And she sniffed, constantly and with great vigour. It made a rich bubbling sound reminiscent of a stew in a saucepan or a rapidly boiling kettle and conjured up pictures of volcanic green lava just about to erupt and spray all around. It was, quite frankly, disgusting.

I did toy with the idea of giving her a pack of Olbas oil soaked tissues, without which I never travel, and expressing sympathy for her obviously imminent demise due either to raging bird flu or possibly suffocation due to her inability to blow her stuffed up nose, but to be honest I wasn’t sure how that would be received and no one ever speaks to each other on the morning train.

I’m amazed that my piercing stare didn’t register on her consciousness, but then perhaps she was so stuffed up with mucus that her brain was clogged and nothing would penetrate it short of a nuclear blast. I spent a considerable portion of the journey staring at her smug face wishing she could be rocketed into oblivion (along with the irritating pissed woman who sat behind me on the plane on the way home from Greece the other night) never to return.

Don’t these people learn manners at their mother’s knee? When I was a child it was drummed into me that to indulge in anti social and irritating personal habits in public was simply unacceptable, and if you had a runny nose you got yourself a hanky (not a tissue in those days) and you blew your nose. Not all parents were successful – I was at infants school with a boy who ate his own bogies in class – but by and large we all learned that you keep your filthy habits to yourself and if you must, you indulged in private bogie feasting instead of public.

I have blogged before of course about how other people seem to lack even the most basic consideration of others. I mentioned above an annoying woman who sat behind me on the Easyjet flight from Heraklion last weekend. She was mildly pissed as is always the danger with late night flights when people have been out to dinner or to the bar at the airport, and behaved like a five year old all the way home. She played with the tray table, had her music on ludicrously loud (I could hear it above my own ipod and the plane’s engines) and sang along tunelessly in a low voice but certainly loud enough for me to hear it. She kept up an ongoing commentary throughout the flight (bear in mind we took off at 11.35pm and landed at Gatwick at 2am local time and you will understand how irritating that was) and whenever the captain banked or she felt the plane do a manoeuvre went ‘whee’. I did think about turning round and complaining, but when I looked she had a husband built like a brick shit-house with wall to wall tattoos, so I thought better of it and quietly seethed all the way home.

But sniffing gets to me every time. Speaking as someone who has had her fair share of suffering with nasal problems, I know there is no excuse for it; I mean tissues aren’t exactly hard to find, are they? If I have to sit opposite her tomorrow, my hatred will be multiplied ten fold and I will take my Olbas tissue and ram it so far up her nostrils it may come out of her ear.

Bet you’d like to be there to see that!