the guilt of ignoring a stranger having previously engaged him in conversation, albeit briefly

I entered the alley that leads to the platform to discover a bevvy of businessmen stomping towards me. Something was wrong; they were stomping in the wrong direction.

"Is there something wrong?" I asked the first man to reach me.

"The train has been cancelled," he replied as he passed me with no retardation to his stride. Perhaps because this information elicited no response from me, he then slowed slightly, swivelled gracefully and, now trotting backwards with no deletion of purpose, nodded to the pursuing business folk in confirmation of the fact.

Soon enough I was in the car with the wife and the boy to seek out an alternative station. As we negotiated a junction, I spotted my informant on the pavement and, just at that moment, he spotted me. He was also seeking out the other station, but the train would leave in six minutes' time. There was no way he was going to make it.

I briefly considered ordering the wife to stop the car so that we might give this man a lift, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I imagined winding down the window as we matched his pace at the kerb, leaning out and saying, "Hello there, come and have a ride with my wife and my baby."

As we mounted a speed bump at 40 miles an hour, I emerged from my fantasy pregnant with the realisation that no such winding down of the window would be necessary, sitting as we were in a Volvo V40 (2003 model).

I imagined depressing the button in the passenger-door armrest as we trundled in the gutter, leaning out and saying, "Hello there, do you like our Volvo? Come and have a ride in our Volvo with my wife and my baby."

I eyed the man's hand gripping his briefcase. It was the kind of hand one might expect to see grasping a lead attached to a brown labrador on Sunday mornings. A hand that has only once been raised in anger to the cheek of its owner's wife, and that was when the silly woman disposed of the weekend newspaper's property section before he'd had a chance to read it at his leisure.

I boarded the train with a heavy heart.