Coburg Station – Winning Station for NQR Have-A-Chats
Weird people wantto talk to me. I’m not sure what it is but I’m like a beacon to them, especially on public transport. It could be because public transport seems to feature higher than normal levels of certain populations. These include the smelly’s, the terrible-music-played-at-full-volume’s, the-unable-to-move-over’s (who put the ‘it’s all about me’ back into PT), the inane-mobile-phone-conversations-at-full-voice’s and the NQRs. It could be that I am particularly lucky but nearly every day I will be sitting next to one of these people. And if the carriage is pretty much empty they will usually sit down right beside me, personal space is for suckers!
Now every time I have had the pleasure of catching a train at Coburg station I have some of the wierdest interactions I have ever had And this is compared with a life time of weird interactions.
The first time I was fortunate to listen to two men discuss the fact that their mate was unlikely to get away with not doing jail time this time around. I think that was for holding up a servo.
The next time I met the mad Need-A-Light lady who when I told her I didn’t smoke said the she hadn’t either until she was 34, it was the kids that made her start, they caused her so much stress!
But yesterday took the cake. Witch-Lady walked out on the platform and I knew my beacon was at full signal. She looked as close as possible to the wicked witches in fairy tales as someone wearing holey trackie dacks could. She was all curled over, with straggly black hair covering her face, hauling some bundles around and used her walking stick to poke the train information button. I was sitting on a 2 metre long bench and she sat down right next to me with not a centimetre to spare. The first thing she did was lift both feet off the ground as if to examine her sneakers, she remained like this for the 7 minutes it took for the train to come along. Upon spying me writing away (please don’t talk to me, please don’t talk to me) she said “I like to write. I like to write so I can look at the words I wrote, they look nice’. As a kid she learnt to write by copying out encyclopedias unless of course she went yabbying with her sister. She was 38 and looked about 60. The conversation pretty much went down hill from there as I tried to appear enthralled by the notes I was writing (’That must be interesting!”).
So if your keen on meeting some interesting people I highly recommend Coburg Station on the inbound platform side.