The worst thing I've done on public transport

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I once witnessed a very heated argument on the London Underground between a woman and a man whose legs she believed were too widespread. The moment she sat down next to him, she immediately said, “Oh no. No, no, no. You’re going to have to close those.”

While his legs were definitely akimbo, they were not obscenely so and he resisted closure, claiming they were a perfectly normal distance apart and he was actually physically unable to get them any closer.

This riled her further, perhaps because it didn’t seem entirely true, and she shouted at him to close them now.

Obviously I said nothing and just tried to pretend I wasn’t watching. But I had a quiet respect for her. It felt like a culmination of years of making herself smaller, sucking herself up like the contents of a vacuum bag, and she’d finally had enough.

This isn’t the most audacious thing I’ve seen on the tube though. I was travelling in the morning rush hour and the carriage was very tightly packed. Every inch of standing space was taken. I was one of the lucky ones with a seat. It was the middle of the row.

As we approached a stop, my neighbour stood to get off. There was now a seat free, which, by every rule, belongs to the closest standing person.

But before this could happen, a man standing at least five people away, if not more, threw his bag over the top of their heads onto the empty seat, effectively bagsying it. He then pushed through, picked up his bag and sat down. Nobody said a word. I think we were all too shocked. I longed for leg-spread lady to be there. If she had been, the fallout would’ve been so great there’d now be a Netflix documentary.

Here’s the very worst thing I’ve seen on public transport though. And sadly I was the disgusting perpetrator.

It was the number 25 bus, which at the time had three different nicknames.

1. The Essex Express as it goes from Central London to Ilford.

2. The bendy bus, as it was one of those long ones with a bendy middle and lots of doors.

3. The free bus, as you could enter it from the middle or rear doors and be trusted to tap your payment card on a reader inside. As it turned out, nobody could be trusted to do this, which Transport for London eventually cottoned on to and held regular ticket inspections before eventually axing all these types of bus.

Anyway, I’d got on the middle of the bus and it was very busy with all those free riders. Every seat was taken. But I’d come aboard at the same time as a very elderly, very frail woman and nobody was offering her a seat. This made me really angry.

So I singled out the person seated closest to where the frail lady was struggling to stand. It was a girl in her twenties, and I gave her a look which could have only meant one thing. You are a disgusting waste of space of a human being and deserve to die.

My death stare worked. She looked at me, then at the old lady and stood up. It was only then that I noticed she was about seven months pregnant.

The old lady didn’t seem to register this and took her seat. What could I do now? Use my powerful death stare on the old lady until she gave the seat back? I was terrified of using it on anyone else for fear they’d stand up to reveal polio callipers, a gunshot wound or that they were in the early stages of childbirth. So I just stared at the floor and said nothing. And just wished leg-spread lady was there to sort it all out.