Warming Up

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Monday 1st November 2004

On the way into TWTTIN I change at Holborn to take the Piccadilly Line down to Covent Garden and my date with Grossman or the anonymous female who does the commentary in some of the lifts.
Even though I generally get there at about 9.30am at the earliest it's pretty much the closest I ever come to communing with the world of work. I know it's not exactly rush hour, but a few late or lazy or lucky souls are still heading for their place of work at that time. Usually I would still be in bed.
As I was coming down the escalator to the Piccadilly Line today I was looking at the faces of the people on the escalator up, who looked like they were mainly about to get into work. Certainly none of them were showing any signs of having fun, but I'm sure I wasn't either.
It's interesting looking at what is in essence a conveyor belt full of people. It makes you contemplate just how many people there are in the world, how different they are and also wonder about what their lives are.
As I scanned each expressionless face I wondered what guilty secret each of them was hiding. We've all got guilty secrets. Most of them are pretty pathetic, I think, and would probably dissolve fairly quickly if we realised how many other people had a similar guilty secret. Shame is over-rated. Most of the things that shame us are pretty universal.
But I wondered if any of these normal and yet varied looking people harboured a really juicy guilty secret: maybe they'd killed a man or stolen from a beggar or drop-kicked a gerbil. There's no way of telling just by looking. But I just wondered what was passing me on this conveyor belt of humanity.