Summer in the city


I travelled home from work on Thursday on the Tube and on South West Trains during the second half of the England v Trinidad & Tobago match and it was brilliant – the quietest I can remember the public transport system ever being at any time, let alone at rush hour.

I noticed a young woman on a Northern Line train who was reading, and looked deathly tired. She had dark shadows under each eye, slanting down towards her cheekbones, and they were perfectly mirrored in tone and angle and size by her eyebrows. It made her look as if someone had drawn a big dark cross on her face.

Amusingly, while the match was going on, particularly on the Tube but also on the overground service a bit, the vast majority of passengers were women – maybe only one in 20 was a man. What's more, most of them were young women, dressed for summer. It was like a beer commercial – “Carling don't build public transport systems – but if they did…”