Inappropriate behaviour

Inappropriate behaviour
OK I am not exactly innocent when it comes to inappropriate behaviour. Far from it, although I am not prepared to go into details. Well maybe I could admit to licking a plate to relish the last morsels of a truffle cream sauce… swigging juice from its carton (but everyone does that… don’t they?) and there was that time I fell asleep at my own party. I was just going to have a nap, but didn't wake up until the next morning. Good thing I had a flat mate (mostly her friends at the party anyway) to hold the fort. And it ended ok. A 7am walk in Port Meadow, working off the embarrassment, and some arty photos taken of dew-filled spider webs and the like. (Although I am still slightly disturbed and curious about the identity of the person who was caught stroking the ceramic sheep on the outside of my bedroom door whilst I was sleeping.) But anyway. All of this has been in the privacy (well sort of) of my own home.
Not in public.
But some people seem to have no sense of what is appropriate. To some extent my reactions reflect on my own upbringing/obsessions/phobias. I mean hey, what’s intrinsically inappropriate about cutting your nails on the tube. (God, the sound of the clippers still haunts me.) And there’s certainly nothing wrong with putting your make-up on on the train. In fact, these women should be given a medal for having the tenacity to apply eyeliner while the train speeds from Loughborough Junction to Elephant and Castle. (We are talking serious swerving here. I am told that it’s to do with crossing points on the line.)
And the woman on the train who licks her fingers every time she turns a page of her free gutter press newspaper. Nothing wrong with that. (I wonder if you can get ink poisoning. I rather hope so. Then I might not have to witness it again. Very Name of the Rose.)
But as I said this is all small fry.
Compared to the guy I was sitting opposite on the train the other day. He was sipping from a large carton of double Elmlea ‘cream’, cradling it like it was some elicit after-work can of beer- on-public-transport kind of thing. And I thought I was weird.
Someone I mentioned this to suggested that perhaps the carton actually did contain beer. If so, I hope he washed the carton out thoroughly. Cream/beer mix. It doesn’t bear thinking about. But then there are people out there who like Baileys. (Erm I have been known to drink it – but only in private. And that’s not official.)
There’s perhaps a slight blurring on the border between inappropriateness and the slightly strange. Or, as I like to think of it, the surreal. Generally one can only keep a grip on the surreality of things if one refuses to look for an explanation. This is something I have always thought of as appropriate. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it can be amusing. Breast pumps, for example. As soon as my ignorance was relieved, so to speak, an amusing aspect of life was also removed. But there are things in my life which will never be explained, thank goodness. The time, for example, I was in a phone box (poor student, no phone) when the booth was suddenly surrounded by 5 burly firemen, shouting ‘it’s in here.” I assume they weren’t referring to me, but who knows. I didn’t, and don’t want to.
The guy who used to walk down the main drag in Shepherd’s bush wearing black plastic sacks wrapped around his legs, who inexplicably turned up in Oxford several years later. (Maybe it wasn’t the same guy. Just a plastic bag man ‘meme’ sort of thing.) Finding a big big beetle on my curtain after watching a TV production of Metamorphosis.
Ok I am straying into the realms of my list of bizarre experiences now. But only bizarre if you don’t try to understand them or half think that there is a meaning that goes beyond the obvious.