Diary: Western Road, Brighton

Walking west along the north side of Western Road, about half way between Currys-PC World and Argos, I spot an outstandingly overweight woman bouncing along in front of me, pitching and rolling from side to side as if trying to keep her balance during a choppy sea voyage. I started to think unkind thoughts about her. Should she have equal entitlement to nhs services? Should she be charged double for the two seats she occupies on buses and trains? That nasty sort of misanthropy. Then I spotted her male companion. He was much thinner, but still probably obese by modern measuring methods. His outstanding feature was the pair of grey cotton jogging pants he was wearing – loose fitting and stretched droopy enough to exhibit his arse crack, but murkily stained in the rear toilet area. The single mark wasn’t big enough to spot from a distance, so not majorly embarrassing, some might think. But walking behind him was not a treat. Just as I expected to again to be taken over by hateful snobbish thoughts, instead I started to wonder whether I should tell him about it, and if I did, what might be his response. I found it hard to believe that his wife/girlfriend/spouse-equivalent wasn’t aware of his soiled state. Then I thought maybe they both knew but didn’t care. Maybe it had only just happened and nobody but me knew about it. All the time these thoughts were distracting me, my eyes were fixed on that humiliating patch. It got to the point where I started deliberately to look away in case anybody thought I had a thing about staring at men’s dirty arses. Then they both squeezed through the door of Foodilic and I was free.