So… I was sitting on the tube bakc to Ealing Broadway, and a family sat next to me. The day was tall but massively corpulent, soma-eyed with a dark blue t-shirt/tent and tight shorts. As far as I could tell, he couldn’t talk. His wife was pretty much normal looking, and the two girls, apart from the standardised slut gear that appears to be the norm amongst school kids, looked normal if a little foreign. Their slack-tracksuited son slumped on the seat next to me, so far that his shoulder-blades were next to my hips and his knees stuck right across the carriage. He writhed there, rubbing his head and talking in German. His mum responded in kind. Dad sat silently. Then the two girls started speaking fluent, slightly-accented english and, after about ten minutes of puzzling, I realised they weren’t German, they were… scouse. No racism intended, just tired-I couldn’t understand them and the nearest language I could approximate from the glottal stops and gutteral noises was German. However, the only thing that the son said after that, which I understood, was “Mum, agh, ugh, where’s Brussels?” and Mum replied… “It’s in Spain.”

I told this to a room full of people, who mostly laughed or tutted. Yet the only liverpudlian took massive offence and called me racist. This isn’t racism; I’d be astounded at such placid (flaccid, mark?) stupidity in anyone and this family just be happened to be from liverpool.

I got off the train at the other end to find Ealing Broadway disturbed, full of policemen and ambulance men and distraught mobile-phoners. A couple of kids had jumped off a packed platform onto the line, presumably to run down it for hi-jinks. One had stumbled and fell against the live line (which they presumably didn’t know about) and been electrocuted in front of the massed commuters. (Electrocuted; a word invented just to describe the damage caused by one of man’s inventions. We have a thousand words for man-made death, don’t we? Eskimos eat your hearts out.) There’s a lot of stupidity around, isn’t there?