Tuesday 28 August 2012

Faith in Humanity Restored.

I'm feeling a bit rough this morning so I am going to tell you about one of the greatest moments of my life.

Firstly, you need an image of me. I'm tall, generally dressed in black and have long curly hair. This attracts a lot of stupid comments from people driving past in cars. A popular one is 'Hair!' I've never quiet worked that out, I mean, I know I have hair, it's not a revelation to me.

Anyway,  few years ago...

Hang on, must digress a little

I was still quite* ill and walking was even more difficult then than it is now. I'm generally pretty upbeat but for whatever reason it had been a difficult day, probably a hospital visit of some sort. I tend to put bad things aside so that detail is pretty hazy.

Digression over.

A few years ago I was walking past the traffic lights, near my old house, on the way home when I saw a white van slowing. The lights were red but the van was clearly slowing far too early for the lights. It was slowing for me.

I steeled myself for whatever was about to happen next. Usually it's comments or shouted abuse, a couple of times I've been spat at but that's (thankfully) been few and far between. But when you see a vehicle deliberately slowing and you look a bit odd you know something is coming. This transit contained three sikhs, long beards, fully turbaned up, big smiles. Two of them were quite young, the one in the centre quite old. They were all staring at me.

At this point, I was thinking, please don't be awful but experience told me that was unlikely. Y'see, we have a belief in our house that Sikhs are lucky because neither L or I have ever met a Sikh we didn't like. I didn't want that taken from me.

I watched the van, slow further. The Sikhs inside were grinning like loons, eyes focused on me and I stopped, waiting for whatever was to come.

And what was to come was a work of genius.

As one, the three sikhs raised their left hands from below the dashboard to reveal they were making the international sign of metal \m/. Then, they very, very, slowly, raised their fists above head height and, again in absolute unison, started frantically headbanging. This left me barely able to walk for laughing. The lights changed and, with another big grin from the men inside, the van was gone.

I have always wanted to say thank you to them for that. So if you are one of those sikhs and are reading this; thanks, you made my day.





*all things being relative

4 comments:

  1. Beautiful moments you'll never forget. Faith restored indeed. Thanks for providing my enduring image of the day.

    Heather (@TessaTangent)

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  2. That is spectacular.

    I like the way you've decided to combat "feeling a bit rough" with a story like that.

    \m/

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  3. Excellent. It's so easy to let memories like that evaporate, but writing them down fixes them.

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  4. I was in the back of the van with a gun trained on them, Rob. They later mooned a nun and ramraided a Blockbusters at my behest.

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