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I have still not shaken off my annoying cold after nearly two weeks, and the lack of exercise has had an impact on my concerted effort to lose more weight. So on the way to Broadcasting House to appear on the Radcliffe and Maconie show I got off at Marble Arch to walk the last bit.
My decision was partly made by the fact that a shifty looking man with a massive suitcase had got on to the tube, caught my eye and given me a weird look. I was unsettled enough to get off the tube just in case he was some kind of maniac with a bomb. A voice in my head said, “Get off” and I did. But that’s a lose lose situation isn’t it? If it had turned out that the unusual man was a terrorist or a madman who hated humanity and was about to release a load of sarin gas then I was going to feel pretty selfish for leaving the other people on the train to their fate. I could always tell people that I’d decided to walk the rest of the way and had been saved by my desire to keep fit, but I’d know in my heart that I had consigned all those people to a slow and painful choking death.
And yet if I had stood up and said, “I think you should all get off because for no good reason other than paranoia brought on by a cold I think that that almost certainly innocent man might be about to kill you,” then I would have looked bad in a very different way. Either racist (if the man was vaguely Middle Eastern/Irish/American looking) or disablist (if he was vaguely mad looking) or just insane (if, as was the case, he was not really any of those things but had just caught my eye in an awkward way).
The voice in my head had spoken though and I can remember so many people talking about the voice in their head somehow guiding them away from tragedy. So I trusted the voice in my head.
But as I walked up Oxford Street and hadn’t heard any commotion from the tube or seen any tweets about sarin gas, I wondered why I had trusted the voice in my head. What if it was one of the evil voices in the head, like the ones that tell serial killers to kill prostitutes or George W Bush to go to war and created decades worth of violence? What if because of the voice in my head I got knocked over by a bus or mown down by a jihadist with a machine gun? How many people have listened to the voice in their head only to be killed by obeying it? We never hear from them. Due to them being dead.
All in all I felt like a damn fool on every level. Nothing went wrong with the tube train (as far as I have heard, but maybe someone made a bad smell on it or something as I doubt that would have made the papers) but luckily nothing bad happened to me either.
And I got a fifteen minute walk in, which might have slightly prolonged my life. The voice in my head may be playing the long game on this one. Though it should really intervene more when I am stuffing my face with chocolate or drinking beer.
The chat on the radio went well. I sat in a coffee shop afterwards trying to think of something to write about for the Metro. I came up with nothing. It didn’t even strike me that the voice in my head stuff might be a good column.
