Tell me fat man, why do you knit?

Some of you might remember the time I used a Greek kid as a Hellenic buffer to protect me from a potentially deadly piece of mail while riding on our amazing public transport system.

Thankfully I've since managed to avoid any similar encounters with randomly abandoned parcels but the merry antics of using public transport keep on comin as reliably as the 233 to Marion.

Do you want to know what I saw on the bus today? A fat man knitting.

A fat, big bearded man with sausages for fingers, two knitting needles and a ball of wool, nah bugger it, I'm going to call it yarn. It was definitely yarn.

How fat was he?

Put it this way this bloke was no jumper but he was definitely a sweater. Put it this way, if you wanted to pull the wool over his eyes, you'd need a flippin lot of wool. Put if this way, if he asked you to darn his socks it would take four people two years to do the job, working 27 hours a day just to fix one toe.

Listen: he actually wasn't that fat.... but he was knitting.

Now, I don't know what "the rub" means, but if you want it, here it is: not only was the man knitting, he was knitting in front of other people and he didn't care a jot. Didn't drop a stitch. Just kept right on knitting when people got on the bus, knit, knit, knitted happily when they got off. He even kept on knitting when I tried to take a couple of sneaky pictures of this knit wit with my camera phone.

NB: In a bizarre coincidence, as I was trying to take pictures of the knitting man with my camera phone, another person who was totally separate from me was sitting on the other side of the aisle, two seats back. He was watching me.

Here's what he was thinking: Shit! I think that Italian man is trying to detonate a letter bomb with his camera phone! What do I do? What do I do?

After shifting seats three times and breaking out into a sweat, he wisely positioned himself at the back of the bus using a perspex shield, two african school girls, an old woman and a Sikh man as a flesh barrier. It was no hellenic buffer but I admired his strategic thinking under pressure.

I admired it so much I decided to ease the tension by putting my camera phone away. By this time the pudgy knitting machine had retired his yarn and needles to a smart black bag and helped his elerly mum off the bus with the patience and care that only a man who knits could possess.

As the bus pulled away, there were so many things I wanted to know. Who are you knitting man? Who taught you to knit? Why do you do it so openly and freely? Did you dear old mum teach you to knit like that? I bet she did, didn't she?

These are open questions, these threads of life, like an unfinished scarfe in a supermarket bag stuffed with coloured wool. Maybe one day I'll see him again and get him to tie up the threads. After all, life is a pattern of sorts.