I hate travelling at rush hour. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will probably be aware of my feelings regarding the HATED MAN-SWARM. It’s a ridiculous couple of hours. Buses that take 45 minutes at a sensible time regularly take 2 hours instead, if they don’t terminate halfway to help regulate the service. I don’t even get on rush-hour tubes any more. Too claustrophobic, jammed in there with a couple of hundred equally tired and irritable people. Gah.

So the alternative is usually swarm-avoidance drinks, anywhere I can find a seat after 6:00 (note: this is a truly crappy time to get out of the office in Holborn / Covent Garden). More often than not this means walking to Camden and hoping for the best, but sometimes I look for somewhere a bit closer to the office.

On this particular occasion, I was in the Montague Pyke on Charing Cross Road. Ghastly place, but it has (or at least had, a couple of weeks ago) bottles of wine for under a tenner and somewhere to perch for a couple of hours. Being a Friday night (take usual late-shift problems and multiply by the first number that comes into your head) the place was packed to the gills, but there was still a tiny space for me, my drink and a book. After I’ve been there about 20 minutes, this woman came up to me.

(Note: if I were anybody else, this might have been, say, an attractive 30-40-something woman with similar taste in books. Sadly however on this occasion I was, as is so often the case, me. So it’s not that kind of story.)

Imagine an Irish babushka. She was in her sixties, bundled up like the Michelin Man in jumpers, heavy coat and woolly hat. This in a chock-full and uncomfortably warm pub. She gestured towards my book (Changeless, by Gail Carriger) and said, “Always more interesting than people, aren’t they?” I nodded and laughed a little uncomfortably and decided that this was almost certainly going to be the case, as she started rummaging in her bag for her current reading matter.

Which was a book about the puzzles and riddles in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. “OK,” I thought, “that is actually interesting”. Then she started rifling through it, telling me how it contains something about 9/11. If it were possible to back away in my tiny perching area, I’d probably have started doing that, but as it was I had to back away mentally. It’s a good trick if you can do it.

I’m not sure at this point if she thought the book predicted the WTC attack, or if she was trying to tell me that Al Qaeda have been using Lewis Carroll to code their messages. She finally found the page she’s looking for – the title was “Dividing by 9 and 11.” A maths puzzle. This was the entire basis of what she’d been telling me for the last ten minutes.

Then she asked me what I was reading. “Oh,” I said, “it’s a Victorian comedy of manners with vampires and werewolves.” “Oh,” she replied, turned around and walked away.

Saved by Gail Carriger. Excellent!

I’m back on the late shift this week. Reading a book about bloggers and zombies.