Favourite Shirts

True story – a few years back I went up to Edgbaston for the New Zealand Test. There was a guy on the same early morning train from my local station into London who seemed to be heading in the same direction. The clues were all there - he was reading the sports pages of the Torygraph, and was wearing a Kent CCC one-day shirt, jeans and sandals and had a rucksack, presumably full of food and drink. Sticking out of the top of the rucksack was a white panama hat.

He was then on the same tube to Euston, and then the same train to Birmingham New Street.

In Birmingham it was pissing down with rain, so my friends and I passed most of the day in a pub near the station. We finally gave up at around 4pm, wandered (staggered) round the city centre, bought about 100 pounds worth of punk rock and Family Guy DVDs at the local HMV and then got on the train home.

The guy from my local station was on the same train – then the same tube train, and then the same train out of Charing Cross. We both got off the train at our local station and walked out of the station at the same time. Feeling that this was getting ridiculous and that I was possibly living in an Ingmar Bergman movie I decided to, belatedly, break the ice;

‘Bloody weather eh?!’

‘Sorry?’

‘Rain – no play at all, a wasted journey!’

‘I’ve been working’

‘Working? I thought you’d gone to the cricket?’

‘Cricket?’

‘In Birmingham…’

‘I’ve been at an IT conference’