Lucky escape

I thought I'd had a memorable enough journey home last night when the young stranger wedged next to me in the train carriage told me he'd just got back from overseas where he'd seen the stage musical of the book I was reading (Wicked by Gregory Maguire). He sounded so very thrilled but I couldn't tell whether this was because he loved musicals in a Friend of Dorothy way or if he was excited about being OVERSEAS. Seeing the book tells the life story of the Wicked Witch of the West in a very grown up way, I was tending towards the first assumption.

Luckily I didn't ask him to compare Judy Garland to whatever happened in this new musical I'd never heard of but talked randomly about how much better this book was than the Frank Baum Oz books I hated as a kid because then he spent the next 15 minutes on the phone to a female friend from his church who'd just become a pastor and talked about his first time travelling on his own at extraordinary length (Not that I'm making any assumptions about the mutual exclusiveness of Young Christians and campness - it just would have been awkward to have assumed the wrong way when we were sitting so very close together).

I'd almost decided not to catch that train because it was a bit full but my Beloved was home sick in bed and waiting for me to cook him dinner. If I'd waited another five minutes, it would have taken me three hours to get home because of another tiny problem with the transport system.

I simply can't imagine how I would have coped with being stuck on a train for two hours with that many people. At least I could have kept reading my book until it got too dark.