New boy, whom we call Howard - for reasons that will become apparent later - has started commuting this week.
Friend Sarah first noticed addition to train-travelling fraternity (and in our case sorority), looking for a seat. Sarah had been hoping to spread out a bit, at least until she reached Haywards Heath, and had put her bag and coat on the seat in a move intended to be deliberately off-putting to anyone who thought they might sit next to her.
But, when she spotted Howard, who happens to look like a Greek God of a more Anglo-Saxon variety - in a dark-haired, green-eyed, lean, mean sort of way, she decided that he was very welcome to park himself as close as he liked and hastily moved her stuff and tried to give him an alluring, come hither and sit here look - but he didn't notice. So she ended up virtually shouting: "You can sit here!"
Howard turned around, came back, and proceeded to scrutinise the seat. "Honestly," said Sarah, later relaying encounter to me. "He put his face about three inches from the head rest and looked at every inch of it. Then he just walked off!"
Sarah had had a good look at the seat herself, as had those sitting around her who'd noticed slightly bizarre behaviour, but none of them could find anything wrong with it. Howard eventually decided to sit further up the train, near where I happened to be sitting. And I just happened to notice him, partly because he again scrutinised every inch of the seat before sitting on it.
"Perhaps he was looking for something?", I suggested when, a day later, Sarah and I were sitting together and comparing notes. But we stopped rather unsubtlety when Sarah gave me a huge dig in the ribs and a huge nodding look in direction of the door at rear of carriage, from which Howard was emerging.
The seat opposite us was free and H came to have a look. "Are you looking for something?", said Sarah, never one to be short of a chat-up line.
"No, no . . . ", said Howard looking at the seat and fumbling in his bag.
"Only . . . ", she went on, undeterred, "My friend thought she saw you looking for something yesterday and I wondered if you'd lost a contact lens? Anyway, they clean the trains every night. So it would be long gone by now . . . "
"No," said Howard. "I wouldn't put anything alien in my eye. And they may clean the train, but not very well. If you look closely, you will notice they do not clean the seats."
As he spoke, he produced the thing he had been looking for from his bag, which was one of those things you see advertised in useless things magazines that come free with the Sunday papers. It looks like a paint roller but miraculously removes pet hairs from any surface and, as Howard demonstrated, can be used to clean manky Connex carriage seats.
He rolled it about until we reached Wivelsfield and then seemed happy the seat was clean enough to sit on. He sat on it, but very straight, with his hands on his lap - so really the only part of him actually in contact with his freshly rolled (with a useless thing) seat was the seat of his trousers.
Sarah gave up trying to flirt and instead raised her eyebrows at me, while I wondered whether this was his only weird habit, which could probably be ignored, bearing in mind the dark-haired, green-eyed good-lookingness, or whether there were more to come.
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