One of the philosophers in College was going on about how when you travel by trains everyone else is so ugly: Hogarthian, and knobbly were his adjectives, but then he is a bit educated. I vaguely remember someone commenting on it a year or two back: deformed, the adjective was that time I believe.
Oddly, my experience is at odds with these esteemed commentators: the last couple of weeks have seen me once again handing over near on four years' worth of book royalties to British Rail for the dubious privilege of criss-crossing the country in comfort and at speed and in company of complete strangers who are paragons of pulchritudinous muliebrity.
And it is not as though I have to seek them out: there was this delicate sylph in the pageboy haircut and the green suede jacket sitting opposite me on that northbound Wessex Scot on Christmas Eve. Whilst I cannot deny that she was sitting there before I boarded the train, she was sitting opposite my booked seat and it could seem churlish had I left that one empty to find an unreserved one with less of a view.
Then there was the vision in the tumbling copper-bronze tresses who, before getting off the Chester train in Rhiwabon, turned to face the mirror of a darkened window and most slowly and deliberately plaited her wantonness into a calm and demure wool-bound pigtail: it was all I could do to contain myself, I tell you. I will confess to just a little disappointment when she equally slowly and deliberately pulled the few odd strands from their previously ordained places artificially to simulate a wild dis-splay. Pah. How can we be expected to trust them?
I cannot decide whether it is just that I have lower standards than my colleagues, or whether there is an exclusion principle by which my presence guarantees an absence of other knobblies.
It may well be trichoinfibulation, that morbid plaiting fetish.