I was settling down to have a coffee in Caffe Nero before heading to the gym. A bearded man sat down on the table next to me and caught my eye. He looked vaguely familiar for a second so I possibly gave him a half smile.
"You were on the bus!" he declared.
I hadn't been on a bus today. I had come on my bike. And although I like going on the bus, I don't think I've been on one for a week or so.
But you know, I have been on a bus and maybe he recognised me from weeks before, so I said, "Well I've been on
a bus!"
He muttered something else which I didn't properly catch and then I went back to looking at the script I am working on, thinking "that's a bit weird - a man who remembers all the people who he's ever been on a bus with and then says hello to them when he happens to see them again."
But it's difficult to cut yourself off from someone sitting less than two feet to your left. I suppose after a few seconds had past and I'd had time to digest what had just happened I concluded that the man was probably a little crazy. I considered drinking my coffee very quickly and moving on before being subjected to another strange conversational gambit.
But the man (who I realised I didn't really recognise at all) was shortly joined by his wife and she looked not-mental and they chatted normally. I then noticed that next to their table were maybe four large suitcases. Presumably they were tourists who had just arrived from an airport perhaps and then been ferried to Hammersmith. In a bus.
Now that was a bus I definitely hadn't been in, but perhaps Dom Joly or Charlie Boorman or Ardal O' Hanlon had been there and the man had mistaken me for them. Whatever, I think we can presume that someone who looked a bit like me if you were a bit jet-lagged after a long flight had been sitting near this man on a bus and then he'd seen me in the coffee shop and blurted out this statement, before then probably realising that I wasn't the person he was thinking of, so he'd gone a bit quiet, probably thinking that I thought he was a mental.
But to try and point out to him that I worked all this out would have just looked mental in itself, so I let it go and we both carried on pretending that this one moment of interaction between us two (probably the only interaction we would have together in our lives- unless we happen to be on a bus at some point in the future, in which case I will say, "It's you from the coffee shop") had never happened.
