The old and the young

In the charity shop two of those volunteering to help the aged are themselves suitably advanced in years. Currently, they are involved in a heated debate concerning what they perceive to be the Great Global Warming Conspiracy. Their shared wealth of experience is impressive and the evidence, apparently endless. I imagine that the conversation began on a contemptuous note regarding the current forecast in which we have been threatened with dangerously high speed winds. Despite the fact that traffic is at a virtual standstill at the Wallisdown junction (which, it’s true, is nothing out of the ordinary), whilst billboards and other assorted rubbish fly past the windows, I don’t doubt that these two have dismissed prevailing conditions as nothing less than typical for the time of year. They must have picked a starting point somewhere back in the dark ages because as I enter they have just reached the winter of 1963.

Aged Volunteer One is bemoaning the fact that they were advised to move south that very year as the gentle climate in Bournemouth would be far more temperate than in his home town. The bloody ice never looked near to melting point until March says he. End of, remarks Aged Volunteer Two. Bloody right says AVO; then there was the bloody floods. From there on, they recount meteorological adversities for almost every year up until the millennium which is when I interrupt apologetically to purchase a small folding stool for £4-99. Of course, it goes without saying that none of the events they describe bear any resemblance or comparison with those that they were privy to in their shoeless childhoods. I ask AVT if he was housed in a box in his infancy and he regards me with some suspicion. In the back room, a young man with ginger dreadlocks and a bandana is pretending to hoover some clothes whilst smiling silently to himself. I feel this to be a far more unusual past-time; indeed, one which I have never observed before and make a mental note to test on knobbly TK Max jumpers. The aged ones are oblivious.

On yet another endless train journey, for which, bearing in mind recent experiences, I have had the foresight to bring two books and a small picnic, we stop at Southampton Central and a veritable gaggle of noisy young men brush past on their way to minding the gap. There is a distinctive fragrance attached to unshaven, red-eyed Sunday morning lads: the pervasive combination of unwashed tee-shirts, stifled alcohol, a memory of after-shave and the vagueness of deflated testosterone. They all carry hold-alls for, were they not on a return journey, they would still be wrapped up in their own or someone else’s sheets.