Victoria Line Fantasies

On the tube train into Victoria this morning I stood next to a young muslim man. He was bearded, naturally, and he wore a suit jacket made from three separate fabrics of varying shades of dark blue. The arms were of serge, the yoke was denim, as were the elbow patches, and the main body of the garment was a gently glistening nylon. He wore black nylon trousers. Each of his tan, vinyl loafers was held in place by a green and red striped band that ran over the top of each foot and attached to an elaborate golden clasp. He had a discrete black mole on the very tip of his nose. He was standing, eyes down, reading the Quran, which nestled in a special leather wallet. His lips moved silently as he read and re-read the beautiful curling tendrils of the script on the page. He stood in the midst of the commuters and never once looked up from his book between the nine stations of his journey.

I looked around the carriage at the other travellers. A plump woman with over-sized spectacles, wearing a purple dress with a voluminous, cream-coloured, lace collar and little gold pumps on her little pink feet was deep into her own book. At the next jolt of the carriage I managed to glimpse the title page: 'Telepathy in Action: Real Cases'.

On the other side of the aisle was another reader. This was an Afro-Caribbean woman in her late-thirties. Her selection was a slim, deep red volume titled, 'Is Satan Real?'

And I thought, what hope, really, do we as a species have when in the twenty-first century we are still so willing to cling to such grotesque nursery fantasies? We are just orphaned children lost in the dark.