12.26am Sunday 17th May

The man sitting opposite me has just woken up, his eyes showing themselves red and watery from under heavy lids. The girl sitting next to him has her head buried in her hands and curls protected and secret against the glass pane separating the seats from the door. Through her fingers when she occasionally looks up to check the next station on the map I see tears making their way down her cheeks along the drying tracks of tears that have passed that way before them. At the other end of this half of the carriage, which has been emptying steadily as we headed west out of central London, is an Asian man, I’d say about fifty to sixty, with rich nut brown skin etched with lines of years of life. His suit was looking tired too and his tall lanky frame seemed to have folded awkwardly and perhaps irreversibly into the small blue Piccadilly line seat. This was the tube and three people sitting opposite me, all doubtless thinking thoughts a million miles away from the other. I began to wonder what these people had come from and what they had to go to - I nearly said go home to, but maybe they weren’t. What had upset the girl? Was the older man’s family at home and sleeping or was he returning to an empty bedsit? I of course had absolutely no idea.

I looked across the carriage between the two heads of the man and the woman, through my reflection in the carriage glass and out onto the platform, where the Northfields sign streaked passed ever more slowly. Before walking to the door I asked the girl to take care of herself, thinking that a stranger asking if she was ok might do more harm than good.

After a week of worrying about documentary success or the likelihood of getting a book deal, these three faces in front of me seemed to be much more important. Real, unmasked yet impossibly difficult to read. I shall probably never see them again. I hope they got home safely….