Tube packed to bursting as ever this morning. No immediate explanation why. Humans cram in off the chaotic platform, pushing, pushing, endlessly. The doors close. Someone jabs an elbow in your kidney and a handbag in your crotch and the train lurches forward. Suddenly you find yourself thinking thoughts that are, in themselves, slightly peculiar things to feel, such as sympathy for liver sausage paté.

I wish they’d sort this out. 7 million people. A crowded train every 5 minutes. Platform packed with impatient lifeforms. £100 for the monthly privilege. Logic? Health and safety? 2012 Olympics? I passed a man on the escalator as the bored voice of Big Brother on the Tannoy announced this morning’s casualties in the war against Eastasia – “there are delays on the Central Line due to too many people using it; there is no service on the Victoria line due to station closures as a result of staff absences. There is a good service on all other lines.” “Yeah, right,” the man jeered, and looked away at a poster of Dave Willetts in disgust. No one believes the propaganda anymore. It’s late, it’s unreliable, it’s expensive and it’s uncivilised. It makes each of us a silent Orpheus, Virgil or Dante, every morning.

But!

This morning there was a man there. Not a remarkable man, but a pretty man. He was in his late twenties, shorter than me and with better hair. He wore a nice pinstripe suit, navy – with a navy jumper and a navy shirt. No tie. Where are you going, Pretty Man? We stood directly opposite each other in the crowded carriage, our faces barely a few centimetres apart. I could smell his hair, his skin. Since I stopped smoking again my already acute sense of smell has become all the more so, and I could smell his aftershave. I didn’t know the brand, but it smelt of lemons and something musky, almost like burnt lilies, not that lilies would smell like that if they were burnt. There was the sweet simple scent of Head & Shoulders from his fingers, clutching the yellow pole between us. What do you do, Pretty Man? I looked at his hand and his thumb was slightly wet from where it had nudged his lip against his teeth, perhaps to nibble absently. I liked his slim shoulders. His jacket fitted very well. Are you lonely too, Pretty Man?

Suddenly my heart began to quicken. I was aware of the painfully minuscule distance between us, the scores of people shrouding us all around, the scent of his skin and hair working its way around me inside – into my lungs, into my brain. I looked at his shoulders again – the back of his neck, at his lips. It must be an impulse of mania, a giftycurse of last night’s recurring absence of self, but I really had to fight the urge to put my arm around him. It was such a strange thought, whispered quietly into my consciousness still preoccupied with coming to terms with Thursday: “you could kiss him,” it said. “You could just lean forward and kiss him. You can do anything you want.”

And you know what?

I really should have done. All I’d have got at the very worst would be a punch in the face and there wasn’t even room for that.

I got off at Euston, losing myself in the madness of yet another brief crowd. He didn’t.

Signal failure, apparently.

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