This morning I finally noticed something; the extreme mistrust that anyone with a seat available next to them greets a newcomer to the upper deck of a bus. Everyone eyes up the options. They second guess the choice this invader will make and calculate the exact proportion of the seat to cover with their arse, their bag, their small dog, their shotgun and grenade belt. Nobody likes a newbie.

On the bus this morning, there was actually a dog. Not the sort of dogs that the old women bring on, slow and cumbersome like a weighty uncle, but a fighter. This dog wanted blood. It hunted seats, even those that were occupied.

When all seats were full up and I got off scot free with a small child next to me (only able to occupy about 40% of the whole chair), the dog’s chair was questioned. A woman wanted to sit down and she did not want to play second fiddle to a being with no opposable thumbs. The owner would not back down. This woman would not back down. The chair was Kashmir. It was owned by both, but occupied by neither.

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Sometimes I walk for the sake of walking. I turn out of the work in progress block of flats I shelter in and have no idea where I’m going. Maybe I’m going to Tesco. I just don’t know yet.

There’s a thrill to it I suppose. Some sort of inner sanctum of grandeur delusions where I am the captain of a ship on a voyage into the unknown. They had Galapagos. I have Brixton Hill. Footfall on both sunshine strips is as calculated as the last. Don’t tread on potential discovery of brand new beetle, don’t tread on potential discovery of a hypodermic needle.

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Sometimes I look at people on the tube, bowing to each other in solemn Evening Standard slumber, and ponder their existence. They make eye contact and stare fleetingly into each other’s eyes until they can take it no more, and nod back into enthralling study of the back pages. Who scored for Chelsea last night? What time is kick off on Saturday? Who has Ashley Cole slept with this week? 

Sometimes I look at people on the tube as if they were an old friend who I’ve grown apart from. I imagine it’s too awkward to talk to them now. I imagine that it’s been six years since we last spoke after that awful night out in Birmingham with a bottle of supermarket whiskey and a casket of bitter resentment. This only makes me froth with rage. I never knew them, but sometimes I pretend. I pretend that this was a person I knew once, but they changed. I grew up and they didn’t.

Passengers look up, already sure of the station’s name, the part of the platform they are nearest and the fact that they’ve never got off there. Even so, they look up, a ritual, every three minutes, heralded by a faceless voice on a Tannoy system. ‘Change here for the Circle and District lines via High Street Kensington.’ People look surprised when people get off. ‘Who would do such a thing’ is a communal thought process, ‘how dare they try to head north.’

Sometimes I look at people on the tube and think of them to be fantastical human beings, selflessly giving themselves to a charity because it’s something they believe in. It gives me hope that one day, I will have a belief, and that eventually I’ll understand what it means to be selfless, rather than a shallow advert for Topman. Then I realise they all probably work in advertising, and instead of being a gift to the human race, they invented talking meerkats and the GoCampare man for six figure salaries. I boil, and not because of the bodies pressing against my face, arm pit cologne seeping into my skin for my evening’s further festivities. 

Sometimes I look at people on the tube and crack a smile as if it’s the most awful act. People say a smile makes a day. It doesn’t. It ends up looking like you’re happy to be crushed against the closing door, and that you’re on the tube for the inevitable sexual tension wafting through the carriage, and not because you want to go home. A grimace is never shared either. Emotions are for the homestead, trains are eternal pools of grey thought, intertwined in half windsor knotted ties.

Sometimes I look at people on the tube, bowing to them in my own Evening Standard slumber and wonder what goes through their head every day.

There comes a time in life where everything changes. Well, some things. Your hands will still be hands, and your eyes will always be slightly further apart that you’d like, and your nose will always be lovingly rounded, like a fat kid in the 1970s.

The location will often change. Buildings are built, old women fall over, ice cream melts, but there’s nothing quite like moving somewhere new, because, no matter how many times it’s said, you are a fish out of water, like Leslie Ash.

I’m currently on a placement, slightly out of London, so I’ve had to re-familiarise myself with wi-fi stealing, 24 hour internet cafes, and the smell of disinfectant. It’s an honest mix of grime-busting and crime-lusting that everyone who’s hit their twenties needs. In order to be the mundane human being you’re going to grow up to be, you have to tip the scales slightly in favour of the wacky, the bizarre, and the caffeine fogged memory bank experience.

Everyone has fond memories of their hometown, even if it’s deep down in the very depths of your mind, stewing in a broth of resentment and alcoholic Saturday afternoons, but it’s only when you move from place to place that you can really disconnect yourself from somewhere and say ‘yeah, it’s alright’. I think with your second drop of the hat, you’ve had more of a choice though, so it’s disheartening to be so close to a city you love and enjoy, but be just too far away to say it’s yours.

The best way to grow up is to grow out. To find bigger shoes to fill, in bigger roles; be it bigger cities, bigger responsibilites, or bigger lines of back alley cocaine, but it gives you the materials to master maturity, to shout from the rooftop that you no longer find a fart joke funny, and that however many times you watch Dick and Dom, you can’t help but think they’re arseholes.

I guess I just wanted to say I’m old now, and this is just the start.