On a rainy day...

Occasionally I wake in two minds. The veil of darkness lifted slowly this morning to reveal an earth-soaking downpour, my favourite start to any day, perfect but for its cycling-unfriendliness. Resigned to inferior transport I grabbed my tube pass and joined the weaving masses underground.

My pod concocted a soundtrack for today's 'me' movie, the mundane glamorised. I walked to the station like a rockstar, all strut and purpose. Passing traffic, flashes of advertising, the train filling shuffle, all were rendered rhythmic and colourful. I walked along a half empty platform backed by the strum of Malian blues guitar - is it acceptable to skip if nobody else hears the music (or even if they do)? Others join me in the iAnonymity - an occasionally synchronised footstep hints at a common soundtrack.

In the carriage humanity hides from its own imperfect reflection, scanning faces, inventing life stories, passing instant judgements in the flickering of a meeting eye. A peak hour carriage produces a thousand silent thoughts, some well formed, some with barely a shape, some in Polish and Hindi. I find myself wondering what thoughts crossed the minds of those on the fateful carriages last July. What proportion joined the dots of the impending? How many were blissfully unaware, led by their white pod plugs to a more inviting time and place? Who saw the scared/not scared face of the bomber? Was the carriage silent that day? The arbitrariness is chilling. A carriage stops at a station and gathers a random mix of lives and stories, drawn together for mere seconds before diverging again. One bad day the polite silence was shattered.

I imagine taking the names and numbers of all on board today, slowly learning their stories, cataloguing their lives into book of carriage 23423784 as at 0954am 17/1/07 - normality, temporarily entwined and rendered rich. Today a million independent city trails are burnt on the London map, each the learned and automatic paths trod by servants of the city's present and its future. The tube is rich.

At 9am outside a Holborn pub two men are chewing pistachio nuts, the shells scattered across the clear puddles at their feet.