A misjudged tube ride from Shoreditch 14/02/20

As so many of these stories tend to be whilst I’m living in this city, this particular experience is also set on a tube.

 I get on the overground at Shoreditch box park, on my way back to Stratford. Fairly sure I’m on the right tube and know where I need to change but not minding too much if I’m not. As I sit down, a small child clambers up onto the seat next to me and his dad crosses the compartment to sit down with him. The dad is entertaining the child by holding his arms in a loose circle round him and catching him whenever he falls to each side ever so slightly. This seems to me like competent parenting. Everyone in the compartment seems to be transfixed by the small child and this father-son game that’s going on. I’ve never really understood passer by’s fascination with babies and children. I catch some of the conversation (which is more like a monologue on the dad’s part really) as it drifts over the music in my earphones, in which he is describing the city as the train glides past the buildings. He tries to get his son to imagine all the people living and working in the various brick edifices, creating lives and jobs and families for them. 

Next to the father and son is sat a man who seems to be singing. I’m not sure if it’s a song or if he’s just improvising. It’s not unpleasant. Gradually, I sense more than witness the dad’s level of stress rise a little as he tries to get his son back into the pram so that they can get off at the next stop. Combined with the man harmlessly singing alongside them and everyone just staring at this child, with my headphones in it all feels highly stimulative and I’m struck once again by how things just seem to happen around me here, almost all at once. It is simultaneously all the reasons why I'd always wanted to live here and equally everything I deplore about the place. London, even on a relatively quiet tube just before rush hour has started, never fails to profess an almost suffocating sensory experience.