Be nice to each other

Well, what a weird week it's been.  At a time when the weather has made front page news, and travel has been at times severely disrupted due to the snow, it's been a chance for our Great British population to complain about something new. Personally, I find snow quite enchanting, and its concept a bit weird. You go to sleep with the streets outside chilly but bare, and the next morning, "flump!" Like the sky saying "well, here you go", thick snow has been deposited everywhere over cars, trees, houses and streets. A blanket of freshness, and although the temperature is probably the coldest you've experienced all year, you can detect a sort of warmness coming from the radiant whiteness, like the world around you has been dressed in cotton. The crunching sound of fresh snow beneath your feet, the sense of optimism you feel when its practically waiting for you to mould it into a throwable sphere, or sculpt it into a carrot-wearing companion, no experience is comparable.

Of course, things do get a bit spoilt when it all turns into mud-coloured mush, and the inclination everyone has of being friendly to each other gradually thaws. Sometimes you can learn life lessons in the weirdest of places; Baker Street station, one morning there are delays on practically every line leaving it. The station announcers are ushering us to different platforms if we want earlier trains, and I finally settle for the Metropolitan line that would take me some of the way to my GP placement. The platform is quickly filling up with no sign of train approaching, and when one does arrive, and doors open, everyone scrambles to the front of the crowd in an attempt to board the train. And it was then did I hear what I never would expect myself to hear in such a setting: "BE NICE TO EACH OTHER!"

Like an authoritative schoolteacher telling off her pupils in the lunch queue, the lady over the tannoy system was trying to calm the pushing and shouting crowd of commuters who were desperate not to be late for work. It's funny, if some people are even slightly impeded upon in any way, they start to lose their inhibitions and begin to get nasty, even though the only consequence would be running a few minutes later than planned and maybe feeling cold for a little longer. And then they need to be taken back 30 years in their personal histories to be reminded to play nice. It made me wonder about how selfish I actually am, not only in situations where the concept of queuing doesn't exist, but in life in general; how far would I have to be pushed before my animalistic instincts got the better of me?

By the way, I love certain memorable days on the calendar. Today is 10/01/10 and for some reason I always feel like doing something special on these days, just because the numbers in the date look nice next to each other!