A Little Bit of Something

It happened again this morning. I was running late. That’s not what happened again, it seems to happen pretty much every morning, so I hardly ever comment on it these days. No, it was while I was bustling to the tube that it happened. A short anorexic girl out for a jog went by me and nearly took me out.

I’m not small. In fact, there is no dimension attached to me that could possibly be classed as small, except for my attention span, which is too tiny to measure. I shouldn’t be difficult to see coming. I was wearing a blue coat and a pink/purple/blue striped hat. I have big hair. I should have been clearly visible, especially from behind. I wasn’t walking up the middle of the footpath, but, rather considerately, I thought, was off to one side. There was nobody coming the other way. But still Little Miss These-Lycra-Leggings-Are-Flapping-Loose-At-My-Bum felt it necessary to try to cut between me and the brick wall I was walking beside, and in the process nearly overturned me. And it’s the second day in a row she’s done it. Being bumped into by her is like having a bag of rulers thrown at your back; she’s all sharp angles with, quite literally, no padding. The only reason she didn’t end up on her arse herself was that there was nothing of her to bounce off me. Kind of like a feather doesn’t really bounce off things as it falls to the ground, it just slightly alters its course, she was able to keep her feet.

But aggressive vertically challenged folk have been out in force of late. Last night I had one standing so close behind me on an escalator that her face must have been getting hit by the bag I had slung over my shoulder. Every time she breathed, I could feel some part of her against my thighs. She would have climbed the stairs, I’m sure, but for the stream of other midgets passing on the left. One of these bolted past at such speed that I was nearly sucked into her slipstream as I stepped off the top. I watched her weave through the crowd when I was caught in a lull, waiting for some moron to find their oyster card while they were at the gates. I couldn’t see her, she was too low down, but I could see the ripple of consternation her passing caused like wind through a field of wheat. It was around about then that I put together my theory about why shorter people are often so much more aggressive in crowd situations than taller ones. The taller ones can see the impact their movement has on the people around them. They can often see that by jostling the person next to them, they bump them into another person, and the contact travels like a wave out from the source. Shorties, on the other hand, barrel through hordes of people only able to see the ones they elbow out of the way – and sometimes it seems that they don’t even see them – until somewhere, Ashton Kutcher blacks out or a there's a hurricane in Texas. I think it’s time I tested out my own version of the butterfly effect though; the next stunted excuse for an adult who sideswipes me and nearly knocks me over because they hit me below my centre of gravity? Yeah, I might just land on them. We’ll see what that does to the butterfly.

*Apologies to all my short friends. You know I don’t mean you. None of you have knocked me over yet. But be warned, if you do…