People Watching...

Definitely one of my favourite pastimes but this week I experienced a more nauseated reaction to people watching than usual. I was in a group environment with people that I had not met before and in my direct eye line was someone with a most unusual, I don’t even know what to call it, nervous twitch perhaps, or a thinking posture.

There is no easy way to describe it and I am saving my most vivid description to place onto a character in my writing (a villain I am sure, and not an endearing one I think) but I shall do my best. The man, for indeed it was a man, was... a finger-licker.

He had ink on his hands. All over his hands, as though an inkpot had upturned all over him. The finger licking could, I concede, have been a result of trying to remove the ink, although why he didn’t just go and wash his hands I will never know. The great-unanswered questions about humans!

But the licking wasn’t a subtle lick-and-scrub attempt to cleanse his hands unnoticed during the meeting. No. It was a full on sugar-on-your-hands-after-eating-doughnuts kind of licking. That’s right. Every finger, every square centimetre of skin on those hands got the treatment. The thorough treatment.  

And then they brought the lunch platters out and spread the uncovered finger food out on the table before us. Saliva journeyed. Nausea set in. I went hungry.

People watchers beware – there are things out there you may wish you hadn’t seen.

Elloise Hopkins.