Puked On and P***ed Off

I’ve travelled on a train with a companion rather ‘worse for wear’ myself. He was bigger than me and thus hard to handle and so I felt some sympathy for the woman whose partner was sick on me and at least two other people as he staggered hastily towards the toilet cubicle on the branch-line train. On my way back from an enjoyable few days with my sister-in-law in Bristol I’d tried to go for a wee on the main-line vehicle that I’d boarded at Exeter but none of the toilets at either ends of the carriage were working and so I’d intended to visit the loo at Truro station only to find it ‘Out of Order’. I was relieved to find then that the two carriage stopper to my home town Falmouth had a toilet cubicle as some of the older trains regularly used on this line do not. Feeling much more comfortable I sat down next to the toilet door which put me in the line of fire for the projectile vomit. After a few delightfully warm and sunny days it rained yesterday and I was wearing my long mac which luckily caught much of my share of the spray.  At first we were all more shocked than annoyed and then before anyone could protest too much the offender’s pregnant partner began to apologise. This she continued to do for the ten minutes it took to get to their, and my, station stop.  With handfuls of tissues she attempted to wipe us all down whilst the couple’s two female companions both berated the perpetrator and joined in with the pleas for our forgiveness. The man, whose reactions and emotions remained dampened by the alcohol he had obviously previously enjoyed, remained, to, I think, the relief of all of us, in the cubicle for the rest of the journey. In what many might construe to be a typically British reaction those of us affected all ended up reassuring the women that it was not their fault, and that we were all fine; ‘no harm done’.

For me that’s where it might all have ended. I live less than five minutes’ walk away from the station and I was soon in the bath with my clothes in the wash. And yet to add insult to injury as I left the platform along with one of the other victims – a late fifty-something like myself – I heard the puker’s apologiser (herself in her mid-twenties) saying to the friends who has arrived to meet them ‘… and then he was sick all over three old women’. I’ll leave it there….