How to get a seat on the train (London)

Met a 94-year-old Thai lady early on last month at Ladbroke Grove Tube station.  She had a heavy shopping trolley of food as well as a big plastic bag, so I escorted her all the way home on the Tube to her front door.

    To help her out financially and to inject some variety into her life, I've since been showing her how to access free meals, with free food to take home:  surplus cooked food from the meals (which would get binned anyway as Health and Safety rules won't let the suppliers store whatever is uneaten), as well as fruit (heavy items like banana and sometimes even a whole pineapple) and veg (potato, carrot), tinned food, etc.  

    One day, I gave her one of my supermarket hessian bags for carrying all that food home, as it's very sturdy.  It is something like 2ft/60cm across and 1ft/45.7cm high, which looks nearly half her size (she's under 5ft / 1.52m tall).  The print on the outside is that of sweetcorn (on the cob), so it's bright yellow and very eye-catching.

    A few days later, she told me that she started noticing a change in commuter reactions.

    Since she acquired this new travel kit, people have been offering her a seat on the Tube much more quickly because of this visibility, thinking she is carrying a big load -- even though it’s empty when she travels alone to these soup kitchen meals.  (When it’s full, I'm the one carrying it for her all the way to her station, often to her front door.)

(London, 2026)

PS:  In case you're thinking of using the same trick, remember you'll have to look 94 as well...

Chinese sayings: 58 (絕甘分少 / 绝甘分少)

絕甘分少 / 绝甘分少

jué gān fēn shǎo

"reject sweet share not-plenty"

(AI) Denying oneself delicacies to share the scarce with others.

This saying is about being unselfish.  

    It's from Siman Qian of the Han Dynasty [206 BC – 220 AD] (漢代 司馬遷的《報任安書》（又名《報任少卿書》/ 汉代 司马迁的《报任安书》（又名《报任少卿书》).

    That how I was brought up as a child:  put other people first, offering the food (scarce or not) to other people first (especially if they're older than you), leaving yourself last.

    That is why it riled me so much, back in the late 1990s, to witness the white British then-boyfriend of my Malaysian student (later colleague when I gave her some teaching hours on my evening programme) running his chopsticks through the fried noodle dish to pick out the already-few pieces of squid (expensive and rare) for himself.

    If he'd been trying to fish them out for my student (later colleague), it might not have been so bad, as that would at least be an unselfish act (even though he was trawling the noodles with his used chopsticks).

    So, it was my upbringing that made me see red over his selfishness, more than his poking his used chopsticks among the noodles.

    He had turned up for a class meal on both occasions when he was not a member, being only spare luggage as the boyfriend.  Obviously to take advantage of sitting at a meal of ten dishes, and paying only a tenth of the bill.

    Two students complained to me later that by the time the dishes got to them at the end of the round, there wasn't much food left for them.  

    I'd been seated at the serving end, but passed on each dish every time it arrived, without taking anything, letting the other people at the table have a go first -- such was my upbringing.

  

    The squid-fisher was seated three chairs away on my left, so he was No.4 at the round table of 10.  His bowl was absolutely groaning with food spilling over onto the plate beneath, as he was piling food onto his bowl faster than he could wolf it down.  

    In hindsight (yes, my brain is terribly slow when it comes to possible conflict), I should've taught him a lesson by offering the subsequent dishes in the other direction around the table -- but, knowing the others, they'd have left enough on the plate for everyone to have a share.  Still, it would've left the squid-fisher less food by the time the plate reached him, and they'd have got something for themselves.  And I'd have a nice memory to bring a smile to my face.  Silly me, didn't think of it at the time...

    

    A more recent source of the red flag for me is a Hong Kong woman (in her 70s, no less, therefore old enough to know how to behave) seated at the same table for the soup kitchen meal.  

    Each table has a table monitor (volunteer worker).  Ours (at the Ladies' Table) would come with snacks for us to nibble while waiting for dinner to be served:  biscuits, an Indian snack called Bombay Mix, etc.  Whatever she managed to get from the food bank.  

    One day, I was seated next to the table monitor, so I was the first to be handed the plate of Bombay Mix.  This one had almonds in it, which is rare.  

    My childhood teaching saw me instinctively not taking anything for myself but passing on the plate to the person on the other side of me -- the HK woman.  She brazenly raked off most of the almonds (expensive and rare ingredient) before passing on the plate.  

    When it came back again to us (table of 12), the HK woman polished off the rest of whatever almonds were left.

    The parents of that white British squid-fishing chap and the almond-raking HK woman obviously never taught them to think of other people...

Linguistic False Friends: 05 (Backside) (Pakistan)

 

At the end of the 37-day film shoot (following an American multi-millionaire amateur motorcyclist from Shanghai along the Silk Route/Road to Xinjiang), we crossed over to Pakistan to catch our plane back to London from Islamabad.

    The first night in Pakistan would've been in Gilgit, but a landslide forced us to divert to a different location for the night.

    The next day, as we sat in the long queue of vehicles waiting for the road to be cleared, our driver said to the motorcyclist's girlfriend (who'd come out to join him for that stretch, having been banned from following us on the whole shoot, as it was strictly work), "Memsahib, the water you were drinking last night at the hotel -- it is from the backside of this mountain."

(Pakistan, 1988)

Linguistic False Friends: 04 (You're not listening) (Pakistan)

 

Listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme one day, I heard the Pakistani interviewee (in Pakistan) saying, when the connection broke:  "You’re not listening."  What he meant was, "Can you hear me?" or "You can't hear me."

Dysfunctional communications: 02 (Asking for sage) (London)

I received a text from a Malaysian:  "Can you see if there's any sage on the allotment?"

    I've been helping out a few people on their plots at a large allotment site (176 plots of varying sizes) in east London, weeding and watering.  In return, I get to help myself to the veg and fruit, which I share with friends.

    This Malaysian has been making special requests like, "Can you see if there're any conference pears / Victoria plums?"  It's easy enough for fruit, as it's usually half a dozen or so.  (More than that would be a bit heavy to carry, e.g.)

    The sage request, however, is a different matter, given that it's a herb which can be dried and stored for future use, so she might be wanting 20 or 30 leaves.

    With so little information to go on, and no reply to my text asking for clarification, I went ahead and worked on the most obvious assumption, and picked half a dozen leaves.

    Well, it turned out that she actually wanted the sage not for cooking but for planting, so the six leaves were the wrong offering.  She wanted sprigs of a certain length, with stems of a certain thickness to ensure they'd grow.

    Why on earth didn't she say so in the first place??!!  Just one text spelling it out would've saved a lot of wasted time and effort:  "Can you see if there's any sage on the allotment? If there's any, can I have 5 or 6 sprigs x inches long, with the stems at least the thickness of the finger to ensure healthy growth."

    An equivalent would be asking me, "Can you see if there's any beef at the butcher's?"  (A Tuesday group Mandarin student suggested a first response, "So what?")  What kind of beef:  stewing beef, minced beef, brisket, steak?  If she wants me to get her some, I'll need to know how much: a pound, a kilo?  And so on.  Spelling it out in the first place would save a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.  Pointing this out makes me the baddie.

    This is someone who does not spare time and effort going over the same story repeatedly, sometimes at the same sitting.  I can understand the need to repeat a story if the telling is for letting off steam, but not spelling out the details when one's needs are so specific is simply inefficient communication. 

(London, 2026)

Huh?!? conversations: 09 (When to talk about my summer holiday?) (London)

Last week was the first lesson of a new term of English classes for Hong Kong incomers at the community centre in north London where I've been teaching English as a volunteer for nearly a year now.

    At the end of the 1.5-hour lesson, I set a topic for the students to prep for the next lesson: Talk about your summer break.

    One of the students asked, “Do we talk about our summer before the lesson, during or after?  At 2pm, or before 2pm?”

    I got back to her with, "I must challenge the strange logic in your question.  Who’s going to be there before or after the lesson to listen to your talk?"

    Luckily, she didn't take umbrage at being shown up in front of her classmates, and laughed along with the rest of the class.

(London, 2026)

Colour change for the fire engine (USA)

Michael Boyle was doing his MA in S.E.Asian History at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) when I was doing my BA there.

    We kept in touch (by snail mail) after he graduated and returned to Connecticut.

    He told me one day that he was writing a guide book for Connecticut (with recipes for traditional New England dishes and all that). This entailed driving around to all the different places, looking around, then doing a write-up for each one.

    Travelling around America is not easy without a car, and since he was already driving around the state anyway, I might as well grab the opportunity of catching a lift, so I invited myself over.

    In return, I helped him with taking photos (one of which got used in the guide book), cooking his vegetarian meals (Chinese stir-fry), and typing up his notes (on his IBM electric typewriter) for the publishers to turn into a book -- no self-publishing in those days, or not in the form as we know it today, anyway.

    I started my visit with helping him renovate the apartment upstairs, but that's for another blog.

    It was fantastic timing too, being in New England in autumn with all the harvest (mainly apples, pumpkins and Indian flint corn [multi-coloured kernels]) and the landscape ablaze with colourful trees everywhere.

    Just before my arrival, the authorities (don't know if it was just Connecticut or the whole of America) decided to change the colour of their fire engines from red to bright yellow.

    Apparently, research at the time showed that the yellow colour stands out much more than the red colour, so it'd be quicker for people to spot yellow fire engines dashing to somewhere and give them the right of way.

    I said, "But with all the yellow trees around, a yellow fire engine might not stand out that much! It could be mistaken for a tree."

    Michael's typically-ever-so-quick quip was, "Well, if you were to see a yellow tree coming down the road at you at 100mph, you'd certainly get out of the way FAST!!"

(Connecticut, USA, 1983)