Do you know this guy on the left? If you do, then you’ll appreciate where I’m coming from. This is Larry David, creator of the inestimable Seinfield and, more recently, equally sublime Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Basically, in Curb (I’ve shortened it for brevity), Larry says the things that everyone always wants to, but somehow society dictates that we shouldn’t – because we’ll be seen as rude. You know the sort of thing, I’m sure…
Well, on Thursday, I experienced a situation where I wished I was Larry. I was on a train heading into London for work. I got on and espied a spare seat and sat down. There were others free, but I wanted this one – it was a nice aisle space and the adjacent seat was occupied by a middle-aged woman. She had to remove a carrier bag to allow me to sit down which she put on the floor (with a slight huff).
She did that thing where she stared and made you feel bad for having taken the seat she thought was explicitly reserved for her 30x20cm plastic bag from Sainsbury’s. So I sat down and quickly realised that there wasn’t a lot of room. Even though she didn’t look big, this woman managed to occupy one-and-a-half seats for the entire journey. No matter how much I shifted and manoeuvred my elbows, I couldn’t get her to budge over.
Ultimately, she had a huge rear-end. And what I wanted to say was: “Excuse me, could you shift your big arse over, so I can actually sit down properly?” Of course, I couldn’t say that, because I would have been seen to be ungentlemanly and sexist. Why didn’t I though? Why is it so difficult to assert your own rights to sit down on a seat designed for one person, not two people’s posteriors?
The one bright side? At least I’ll recognise her the next time I get on the train and will avoid that oh-so-tempting spare seat!
I think I saw the woman with the largest bottom ever during a recent visit to Copenhagen. What was made this discovery more perculiar was that from the waist up she appeared to be quite thinly proportioned. It made me wonder whether or not she was pregnant, and the foetus has somehow migrated to her posterior rather than her anterior. This then led to a train of thought along the lines of her having contracted elephantitus or some other tropical disease (which would be strange for Denmark) perhaps during some humanitarian trip abroad, thus making me feel like a bad person for thinking about how impossibly huge her arse was; which leads me to my point: women are so obsessed about their arses, that any comment about the size, shape or one and-a-half-seat-taking-up nature of said body part feels rude. Even if its perfectly justified.