Meh
On a ferry in Brazil a few years ago I was severely hungover and not in the best state of health to cope with the pitching of the deck. In fact I was distinctly queasy and every orifice desired to leech fluid (with or without chunks) at the nearest given opportunity. To complement the feeling of having drunk Castrol GTX my tongue was dry and furry, my head was pounding, and every extremity ached and throbbed (and not in a good way).

At this point a man, somewhat resembling Ivan Jelical from Viz, plonking himself down next to me and started talking to me in Portuguese. He held out a religious phamplet and started pointing at it. I tried to explain that a. I was hungover, b. I am an atheist, c. my portuguese wasn't quite good enough to understand his Revelation style meanderings and d. would he please fuck off.

After 40 minutes of me slumped there, getting increasingly sick, listening to him go on and on I finally managed to fob him off on some Germans near by. He left me a leaflet, which I later read and which revealed that he was a member of some political party that advocated a return to 'Jesus's Reign' as a political program.

The other really bad time was when I was on the Tube from Richmond to Kew Gardens. I was off to the National Archives to do research. I'd just started my Master's Degree and this was my first time going to the Archives. I was full of joy, hope, and other assorted 'slushy' feelings. I sat down, and opposite me sat a gentleman of about 40.

He was wearing a long, dull grey-beige flashers mac, a pair of lycra shorts, a shirt and a tie. His unkempt, rat tail hair, fell unwashed over his collar. He smelt of vomit. Every few seconds his gnarled and chewed hands would rasp over the bristly stubble covering a canaverous face.

This gentleman carried two bags. One was full of oranges, the other full of random bits of paper. He took some paper out of one bag, shuffled it, burped, exuded a greater smell of vomit (causing the rather attractive afro-caribbean girl, whose ample, and gratifyingly visible, cleavage had been a distinct pull upon my gaze, to hightail it to the next carriage), looked up at me and, fixing me with a gimlet stare, slowly lifted his shirt up to reveal a greying string vest covering his pockmarked stomach.

We stayed like this for maybe 15 seconds... he, with his shirt lifted up, his bag of oranges and his bag of paper next to him, me, with day time sexual fantasies suddenly replaced by the image of an insane tramp showing me his stomach.

This vision then opened his mouth, and said to me:

"Are you staring at my oranges?"

I mumbled no, and he put his shirt back down, and went back to shuffling his papers. A few minutes later the train pulled in to Kew and I got off.
(Zapiola zip-zap-zop, Sat 31 May 2008, 1:28, Reply)