The Good Samaritan

Let me tell you story. Yesterday, two girls got on the tube, sat down and started chatting. A couple of stops later, a man got on and sat down next to the girls, giving them a glare as he did so. The man was unknown to the girls, a complete stranger and they ignored the glare. Suddenly, the man leant right across one of the girls and started yelling in their faces, full on demented raving at the top of his voice.

To say the girls were gobsmacked would be a gross understatement. They were shocked, scared and literally afraid for their continuing health. After all this nutter could have been armed with a knife or he could have started throwing punches any second. (On an aside, I don't like calling him a nutter but, really, what other word will do in this sort of situation? I could go on for ages about care in the community and paranoid schizophrenia but we have no idea why he acted the way he did.)

Meanwhile, all the other passengers are doing that typical "don't involve me" thing of sitting there, heads down, eyes averted and hoping the man wouldn't start on them. But that's where the story veers off into Hollywood territory because one passenger did something remarkable. He was in his late twenties maybe, a fairly ordinary bloke sitting opposite the girls and he did the one thing no-one else was willing to do; he distracted the nutter.

In our eyes, this man is a hero. He berated the nutter and told him to calm down. He provided a much needed distraction while we legged it to the other end of the carriage and prayed for a station to arrive. When the nutter stood up and made to follow, this hero stood in his path and refused to let him pass and the girls got off the train safely and without further incident.

What now preys on our minds is not know what happened next. Is our hero safe and sound or did the situation escalate into violence when we fled the scene? We want to know and we want to be able to thank the good samaritan who revived our faith in the basic goodness of human nature. We've been thinking about posting something, but where? Should we write a letter to the papers? But where is the guarantee he would see it?

So, here on a blog that very few people will ever see let alone read, can I just say "thank you" to a bloke who did the right thing. I hope you are appreciated by your friends and family, you are one in a million.