A beautiful moment

Gosh! I’m in danger of exceeding my two blogs per week quota. But I had to share with you all something beautiful that happened to me yesterday.

Note to those of you I work with: I’m writing this in my lunch hour – I have a new ‘two full days per week’ regime, as well as the two halves. It’s kind of weird being here all day. Nice :).

I took the train up to Paddington yesterday – as I’m obliged to for work, a couple of times each month. I love these days in the Big Smoke, but since having Babe, the earliest train I can get is at 9am, after dropping him at nursery (Other Half having left the house hours before me) and I feel my late arrival is an encumbrance. I feel a bit lopsided when I get in, and out of psynch. And where it used to be a fairly tiring day in itself, these days the 50-minute walk to the station aggravates a knee problem I have developed since giving birth (diddums! and how is it that I haven't yet been to have it X-rayed, as suggested by my doctor?), and my general state of tiredness makes these day trips harder to get through than previously. (Good grief - was that another moan? I must stop referring to being tired in this blog or I will send you all off to sleep.)

Anyway, on arrival I walked briskly from the train to the underground, and had reached the bottom of the first flight of stairs when a man rushed up to me from behind, and caught my arm.
‘Excuse me!’ he called. He was about 50, I’d say. Nice face, nice suit, nicely-groomed. A confident and up-together air about him, and altogether quite a dish.

‘Yes?’ I replied, noticing that he was holding a bunch of flowers. Anemones. Pretty; unusual.
‘I just wanted to tell you I think you’re gorgeous!’ he exclaimed. ‘I was listening to you on the train and you sounded so warm and intelligent. Funny. Engaging.’

I’m not sure what my face was doing. Usually I struggle to hide what I’m feeling but for once I was quite taken aback and it took a while to register what he was saying. In fact it was quite surreal, us talking almost as though we knew one another. A lump formed in my throat and my annoying habit of crying when I'd rather not was threatening to kick in.

‘I’m not making a pass!’ he went on. ‘I’m married. But I wish I’d sat down next to you on a train twenty years ago. These are for you.’ And he handed me the flowers, which I suppose he’d rushed to buy on the platform above. My God, I hadn’t even noticed him in the carriage.

‘Gosh,’ I replied. Thinking fast on my feet is generally one of my strengths and I came back to earth with a bump.
‘That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s said to me for a long time,’ I laughed through the water that was starting to creep down my cheeks. ‘My husband would tell you I'm a pain in the backside!’
‘Aren’t we all, sometimes?’ he answered, and leant forward and kissed me on the cheek, before it occured to me to try and stop him (I'm the kind of girl who waves to lorry drivers in a friendly manner when they toot, thinking a friend of mine must be up in the cab) and then walked off into the underground, even turning to wave before he went through the barriers.

I stood where I was for a few seconds. My legs wouldn’t move and besides, I thought I’d give him time to get away. I didn’t want to spoil our beautiful moment by finding myself cheek to jowl with him on the Bakerloo line.

Then I looked at the flowers. Georgeous. But not really mine to keep, I didn’t feel. And I didn’t want to have to explain where I’d got them when I arrived at work. Ahead of me was a tired-looking mum, trying to cajole her toddler into the pushchair. As she turned to pick up her bags, I popped the bunch onto the folded-back hood, and quickly carried on. I hope that gave her a nice surprise and didn’t freak her out!

For the record, the last person who paid me almost the exact-same compliments (excluding the bit about wishing he’d met me twenty years earlier of course) was my dad, several years ago. We were with a group of people around the dinner table at his house, a place I don’t go very often. He sounded kind of surprised when he said it.