Five Londoners

On Friday, I was on the Circle line when a group of three musicians hopped on the train with their instruments and told us: “Hello everyone. Welcome to the Circle Line. We’re going to play a little song for you. It’s a jig. We encourage you to get up and dance.”

And people looked up suspiciously from their phones and books and newspapers. A few cracked up the corners of their mouths in shy smiles, others immediately darted their eyes back to their laps. No one got up to dance.

After the first song, one of the musicians said, “Okay, well maybe you’d prefer a waltz? Or do you have a headache? Or perhaps you’re just uncomfortable with social situations? If that’s the case, you can keep on pretending we’re not here.”

And that hit a note for a lot of people because then a few people did the unthinkable – they made eye contact with one another and a few even chuckled. The guy across from me started tapping his foot. The band played on for a few more stops. At the end, even the ones who never looked up from their papers dropped a few coins in the bucket.

They were good, funny, entertaining, and to lighten the atmosphere of a serious morning tube ride is a challenge indeed. There seems to be an unspoken agreement amongst Londoners that if anything odd, unusual or completely out of the ordinary happens, no one will acknowledge it. If someone walked onto that train completely naked with a python wrapped around his waist, people may glance up out of the corner of their eyes, but they would probably carry on reading their papers with a serious face.

I could spend days on end just watching the city unfold and watch it’s people carry on through the day, doing odd things and ordinary things. It fascinates me to no end.

So I will leave you to enjoy a few photos from the Flickr pool of Londoners going about their business…

Snug Fit by Sabine Thoele