Sometimes you see something that only gives you a certain amount of information and you wonder what the story is.
On the tube this afternoon I was sitting opposite an Asian woman of around about 30, apparently on her own, wearing a headscarf and what looked like traditional or even religious clothing, but carrying a large heart-shaped balloon with a rubbishy cartoon of some horses on it. As far as I could tell the cartoon characters did not come from any well-known film or TV series, they were just generic cartoon horses, possibly tipping their heads towards each other as though they were in love. It was an odd balloon for a 30 year old woman to be holding and if it had been a gift of love from some admirer then it was a) clearly quite a cheap one (she was holding it with a poorly cut and inappropriately thick piece of string) and b) not making her particularly happy. She seemed slightly morose and deep in serious thought and not giddy with excitement as someone who had been given a heart-shaped balloon with some generic cartoon horses on it should be.
I sat and looked at her and surreptitiously took some photos with my camera-phone (which I'll doubtless put on in the downloads section) as I wondered, "What's the story here?"
I wondered if she was a kind of budget version of Miss Haversham and had fallen in love with some man as a teenager, who'd won her this balloon at a fair and when love's dream had died she'd kept carrying the balloon with her everywhere she went (having had to replace the original string at some point).
I wondered if she was a big fan of some very terrible early morning Channel 5 cartoon series about some anthropomorphised horses, that no-one else ever watched and she'd just found this rare piece of merchandising at some obscure Sunday market.
But no scenario I could think of could explain this slightly odd turn of events.
But just as I was getting off the tube, the seat next to her was vacated and an Asian man with a pram with a toddler in it sat down next to her and they exchanged some brief (if slightly tired and unfriendly) words.
Now everything suddenly fell into place. She had a balloon because she had a baby and she was merely holding it for her. She was morose and tired after a long Sunday afternoon off and was enjoying the quiet time to herself and letting her husband look after the kid. The balloon was cheap because the child was so young that there was little point in getting a better one with a proper bit of string. It wasn't a romantic gesture to purchase the balloon, but still one tempered by love. So the heart-shape and the cartoon horses were now entirely appropriate.
It's interesting how our brains try to work out the facts when we're presented with too little information. And how wrong our suppositions can be.
