I resisted the temptation. It was too easy a joke to make and anyway, it would probably have been met with indifference.
Ah indifference. All my life it's been an enemy. It stalks the shadows, unclear and unseen. Sometimes I've imagined it and it hasn't been there; sometimes I've ignored it and it has. That can be painful.
Sometimes, when I've told silly jokes, it's actually made me laugh from the inside out, due to my peculiar sense of humour (weirdly, one of the funniest things is no-one laughing at something that wasn't funny).
I wasn't risking it today though. It's Monday morning. Things are skewy on Monday mornings.
The traffic queue at the bottom of Sulham Hill was enormous. Brake lights trailed round the bend and I slowed to a halt by the field. There were horses grazing. A tiny rabbit darted out of a hole and was lit by the sunshine for a while before diving away again. It was a beautiful moment that I would have missed, had I whizzed by, listening to Radio 4.
I suppose people aren't deliberately indifferent. I know I try not to be. Time is limited and we care about the things we care about, each of us prioritising the things around us slightly differently. Our reactions reveal those priorities, collapsing (and yes we're back here again) the perception-reality gap.
The rabbit was alright. He just had a moment in the sunshine next to a busy road, where strange commuters shuffled along listening to the radio.
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