Oral Fixation

I think I may have written about this before, but it happened again today so sod it, I’ll write about it again.

On my commute, there’s a guy who also regularly catches the same train. He is – let’s be tactful – slightly odd. He’s probably the same age as me, maybe even a bit older. Throughout the journey, he will sit, using his Blackberry phone/email thing. Well, I say using it – but most of the time he appears to just sit and read whatever’s on there. No replies, no real interaction that I spot, just (I assume) reading whatever’s on the screen. I suppose it could be a film or whatever – I don’t know if you can play videos on a Blackberry, for one thing – but equally he’s playing music through headphones from his iPod, so I kind of doubt it. I dunno.

But all the while he’s using the Blackberry, he’s also sucking his thumb. And that, to me, is definitely odd. It jars, seeing a grown man sucking his thumb. Sure, it’s a harmless thing to be doing – and far less offensive than the other people I see picking their noses or whatever – but the thumbsucker is (for me) a stand-out in the day-to-day routine and oddnenss.