There's Aliens in our Midst

As my friends' conversation clambered through insurmountable ICL BCN ECC OMD technobabble acronyms, my gaze began to wander the train carriage, taking in the other passengers. I observed the couple sitting beside us. Somehow they seemed vaguely familiar. The man bespectacled and in his respectable mid-fifties or sixties sat opposite the woman, who I fleetingly suspected of being Barbara Castle incognito. Certainly they caught my eye for some inexplicable reason. I couldn't even tear my eyes away to watch the squaring up of a vicar and an atheistic ticket collector who were on the other side of the PBC XON AEON nerd-speak aisle.

The couple barely spoke, they were buried deep in newspapers scattered across the table between them, telegraph, times, mirror. Occasionally they would pass a few comments on the articles they were reading in tight polite English, not a trace of regionality in their tonality. They didn't seem 2nd class carriage material at all.

I was crushed up against the thigh of the man and began reading over his shoulder. The train crawled onward, and I'd read all the articles and adverts on the page twice, over the guy's shoulder, before I realised that he hadn't turned the page at all. He was stuck staring, pretending to read, an article about brutal sexually motivated floggings in public schools. The woman spoke "Ah, do read this dear, it's about Norwich". And she pronounced it NOR-WITCH, like an American might say DUL-WITCH when he meant DULL-ITCH. The word screamed impostor thrown amongst the measured correctness of her BBC accent. I flinched.

Suddenly the train was pulling into Kings Cross and the couple began gathering up their papers and periodicals. Without a trace of irony the man with the manner of an ageing diplomat jauntily tucked a folded Time Out magazine into the back pocket of his pin-stripe suit trousers, the woman folded a copy of Loaded into her commodious ministerial type handbag. I gazed on in wonder as the middle-aged aliens walked out and were swallowed up in the shifting crowds on the platform.