2004-04-30 - 2:59 p.m.

I�m aware that many of my entries begin �So yesterday I was on the tube and BLAH BLAH BLAH some weirdo BLAH BLAH hot cheese fondue BLAH BLAH BLAH got off on a technicality BLAH� and stuff, but I AM on the tube when lots of funny things happen, so you can just mind your own beeswax, champ.

So yesterday I was on the tube, standing in the little lobby bit with the pole in the middle, only I�m in one corner because I like the corners. We come into a station and a woman gets on with a pram. She has vast tracts of open space to herself, but she parks the pram about an inch from my feet, and as I look up from my book, I see that she has totally hemmed (prammed?) me in. it�s like I am invisible, or she is blind, and I don�t think she is blind, unless they have started using gibbering toddlers in prams instead of guide dogs.

I feel slightly uncomfortable, and I can barely lift my book to read it she�s so close, but it doesn�t seem to worry her. People getting on must have just presumed we were a couple, and I swear the kid was looking up at me in that goofy, vacant way they have as if to say �Are you my new daddy now?� It was quite unsettling.

Five stops later, the carriage still empty apart from our weird, pram-themed menage a trois in the corner, her still about an inch from my face, they got off. I felt as if I�d been spatially violated and not even the busker with the trumpet in the Sylvester the cat outfit could shift that uneasy feeling.

If I ever want to imagine a nightmare world, I either consider my employment prospects in seven week�s time, or think of one where some future government creates legislation that forces people to adopt random children.

Last night I dreamed I was fishing with a net for dead puppies in a murky bucket. Way to go, unlimited imaginative possibilities of the human mind.