MeyerBros

The other evening I was on the way home on the London Underground, waiting for the Northern line train. I walked onto the platform and sat down on one of the benches beside a middle aged man. At first I didn’t notice anything unusual about him; he had tight cropped hair, calloused hands and his skin looked like a man who had spent much of his life in the outdoors. But some of the details were slightly off, like the bottom of his trousers which were tightly cuffed in a way not usually fashionable among men of his age.

A minute or two after I sat down, a train pulled into the station. As it blew by us and then pulled to a stop, he frantically scrawled six five digit number in red ink across a single page of his notebook. 57801, 57301… Though he had been staring straight ahead the entire time, he had somehow managed to read the numbers of each of the six carriages in front of us as they had whizzed by. I realized I was in the presence of a tube spotter and a very good one at that.

As the tube train pulled away from the platform, the man leaned back in visible satisfaction and took a swig from his soda. He was having a great time. As we sat waiting for the next train he began quietly, gruffly humming to himself in an unself-concious. It wasn’t an unpleasant sound, but enough to clearly signal that he was not aware of the social conventions or norms of the space. He vaguely flipped through his notebook and I saw six carriage numbers scrawed broadly across each page. There must have been at least 40 full pages. As he absent mindedly caressed the pages, I began to recognise patterns that were familiar to me from working with autistic clients.

Soon the next train could be heard, roaring down the tunnel. I watched my new friend lean forward in anticipation, his pen poised above his notebook as the air rushed out of the tunnel ahead of the train. And then it was upon us and past us. Again as it went passed he fixed his stare straight ahead for one second before his hand jumped across the page scrawling six more long red numbers. It was my train, so I got on and left him there, sitting happily on the bench by the platform.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 7:30 pm by tim and is filed under personal, geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.