Traveling on London's public transport is a lottery when it comes to the people you can find yourself sat or stood next to. I think I've experienced most types over the near thirty years I've lived here.

The majority, that great silent crowd of momentary neighbours have been exactly that, silent; there's been the surly - avoid any bus or tube with football fans, especially English in it; the chatterboxes, usually from out of town, who don't know London's informal code of conduct on public transport, the unwritten credo that you shall be silent and uncommunicative - we really are islands, entire of ourselves - or they do, and intentionally set out to talk, self strengthening their folk belief that people in London really are n't friendly.

I've been next to school kids, swivelling around in near riotous mood on the top deck of buses; seen fights break out on a tube; someone been given oral sex; plenty of people weeping; far too many drunks; been up close and personal with London's lost and lonely, muttering to themselves; too close to some very smelly people, including oddly one or two who were extremely well dressed, proving that a good sartorial state does n't always mean an equivalent olfactory one.

But tonight, coming home on the 148, was a fresh, new number: a somewhat overweight woman in an adult sized fluffy romper suit. From what I could make out from the four or five minutes we were sharing the same seat on the top deck, this was not a stunt or exhibitionism or someone en route to a party, this looked to be her normal life.