Seen and heard

Heard: I don’t recall noticing it this time last year, but with Passover in full swing, the last few nights there has been some quite haunting singing heard from the nearby synagogue. It makes a pleasant change from the normal dull roar of distant traffic and toots from trains.

Seen: A lady walking along the street with her shopping. In a green shopping bag. Balanced on her head. Evidently not mucking about for the benefit of friends or anything, just walking along on her own, balancing the bag apparently effortlessly.

Seriously. Alas my Real Camera was at home. I managed to snap a pic, but only with my phone camera and at a distance, so I suppose the cynics could just claim it’s someone with a really big head.

Heard: Almost forgot about this. Last week on a Sandringham train, a lady who talked at someone else via a mobile phone solidly for more than ten minutes. Something incredible was obviously afoot — either someone had messed up a wedding floral arrangement in some spectacularly incredible way… or she was being incredibly anal about a wedding floral arrangement. Either way it was the sort of conversation that was not shouted or full of profanity, but still had some people on the train staring in amazement or — in the case of one man — so distracted that they moved carriages to get out of earshot.

I struggled on to read my copy of MX (thankfully it rarely has anything too thought-provoking), and as she and her phone and her conversation got off the train, I turned the page and found an article discussing the etiquette of mobile phones on public transport.