Recently I made the mistake of saying hello to the person on the bus who I was sitting next to. I’m not sure why they reacted in the way they did – I’ll admit that saying hello is best done straight away, and I waited until I had stopped reading the chapter of the book I was reading and that may have been what started it – but now I wish I hadn’t bothered at all. That makes me sad about saying hello to people I don’t know, and we’re all human beings aren’t we? Would it kill us to behave with a bit more respect for one another?
It began like this:
“Hello,” I said, “pleased to meet you.”
The man looked at me as though my head was slowly falling off at the neck and I had really bad acne scarring .
“Excuse me?”
I spoke louder and this was my second mistake:
“I SAID HELLO!”
He pulled away, but he had nowhere to go. Then he looked up at the open window and for a second I half wondered if he might try and squeeze out of it (he was almost obese, so I hoped he would not).
“I heard you the first time, but we don’t really do the Hello thing in England.” He turned away. I looked at him until he looked at me. “What?”
I said “sorry about that, I was only being nice.”
He said “well thanks, but it’s lost on me.”
I almost wanted to cry, but as I was getting off the bus another person, a nice lady, tapped me on the arm and whispered “he’s a right grumpy git that man, I wouldn’t worry. You can say hello to me if you like.”
That was all it took and I was happy and smiling again.
