WHEN PERSONAL GROOMING SUCKS

by Sally Wells

As a rule I reckon it’s advisable to save ranting for the things in life you feel truly indignant or passionate about. All day whingeing about irritating trivia is tedious and pointless and debilitating. That said, everyone has minor moans of the “bloody hell, what’s going on here?” variety, so here, for starters and guaranteed to bring out the bombastic in me is ... Personal Grooming on Public Transport.

By PGPT, I don’t mean the relatively minor transgression of putting on make-up on the tube. If someone wants to gurn into a compact mirror whilst dabbing their face with a sticky sponge or risk eyeball injury using lash curling tongs whilst lurching round bends on the Northern Line, that’s fine by me, so long as they don’t indicate via the medium of filthy looks that they resent the attention of onlookers. After all, if you will make a public display of your beauty routine, it’s a bit rich to react like someone’s just barged into the bathroom without knocking when your fellow travellers can’t help watching. The PGPT I most dislike is the nausea-inducing but also hideously compelling sight, and sound of Clipper Man. I’ve yet to see a woman doing this, but on many a bus journey I’ve heard the tell-tale snip, snip, snip of clippers and had to move to another seat, preferably on the bus behind, to dodge the yellow crescents pinging around the top deck. What on earth makes people think this gruesome behaviour is acceptable aboard a bus? Scraping the funk from under your nails and brushing it onto your neighbour’s lap is also pretty lacking in charm but unaccountably people do it! And talking of unwanted deposits, why do people with heads full of hair gunk lean against the window so the people to sit next have to view the London streetscape through a smear of grease, patterned with worm-like traces of individual hair DNA. Ye-uch.

Aren’t there bye-laws to prevent these lapses of hygiene and good taste? If Boris and Transport for London really want to improve public transport etiquette they need to add a few more signs to their thou-shall-not notices. Scoff though we may at the thought of our ancestors wading through streets awash with the contents of the neighbourhood’s chamber pots; we’re not exactly squeaky clean ourselves.

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