Last night, after enjoying the wonderful music at the IC Choir Concert, I was feeling a little tired so decided to skip the Union and go straight home for some much needed kip. At about 10pm I got onto an eastbound District Line service, and settled down to read someone's unwanted copy of a free newspaper. Nothing unusual so far. I make the same journey every single weekday, and apart from there being more or less passengers, there is nothing noteworthy about the trip. Last night however, was sadly a lot different.

Sitting in an almost empty carriage, I amused myself with the writings in London Lite, and was unaware of people joining or leaving the train. I briefly glanced up when an old man, who looked a little tipsy, boarded and sat opposite me. Thinking that it as it was Friday night, there was nothing unusual about this scraggy man being drunk, so I carried on reading. Unfortunately, the man wasn't so keen on ignoring me. His drunken mumblings became louder and louder, and soon I became the target of a whole host of obscenities. Still attempting to ignore him, I simply tried to keep my eyes down, and observed that the few other passengers in the carriage were doing the same. Everyone's encountered someone drunk on the tube before. But I doubt many of you have experienced what I did last night. For absolutely no reason, he directed his swearing at me. I was repeatedly called the N-word, an f***ing b***h, the P-word, and the foul C-word. Attributing it to his drunken state, the fact he was old and smelled of weed, I did my best not to react, though internally I was becoming scared and angry. Then, out of nowhere, he decided to gather all his strength and saliva, and spat at me from where he was sitting. Not once, but twice. Did anybody in the tube do anything? Of course not. In tears and shaking, I hurriedly left the train at the next station, which thankfully was my stop. I cried all the way to my flat.

This is the second time in about 2 years I have experienced something like this, though the first time was on a bus and a friend did intervene. Both situations involved drunk individuals, but that doesn't justify their behaviour. I am sick and tired of proclamations of London, and even England, being such a diverse, multi-cultural and accepting place to live. I've lived in this country for all my life and have embraced the values and cultures of this land. Why should I get spat on just for being brown-skinned? I am not afraid of living in London, but I'm aware that I'll probably continue to be called names. This incidence has just made me more eager to leave England for good. I'm not sure I even want to do a PhD here any more.

Have you ever wondered how much you actually know about the people you surround yourself with, those you like to dub your friends and companions?  I don't mean whether you know their middle names, or how many siblings they have, or what they like to do on a Sunday afternoon.  I mean really know them, as though you were at one with their innermost thoughts and feelings.  Of course, we all share things with our "friends". Whether we are male or female, we have our little secrets, in-jokes or private conversations with our male or female friends, and so these make us believe that we know our friends and that they know us.  We snigger over how many sexual conquests our friend has had in the last week, or huddle over and discuss who our friend admires but is too shy to ask out.  We talk about which films we like, what concert we'd like to attend, which our favourite type of food is, or what we'd do if we won the lottery.  Sometimes, perhaps, with the closest of our friends, we talk about what we want to achieve in life, our ambitions and goals, how our relationships with our family/partner/other friend/colleagues are panning out and so on.  We talk on and on about all these things, but do we know our friends?  More importantly perhaps, does anyone really know you?

I have secrets.  Some which are secret to everyone, a few which a couple of people may have been let in on, and a load that I forget about and disregard as being important over time.  Everyone has secrets, everyone has something they wish to hide, or forget, or pretend didn't happen.  If someone tells you otherwise, I would advise you not to trust them with your life.  Friends can know these secrets, and so claim that they know who you are and how you think.  But do they?  Just because they may know who you fancy doesn't mean they know you.  They just know something about you.

Do you know what prompts your friend to get up in the morning?  I don't mean the fact that the alarm rings or the sun shines through the window.  I mean, what is it that motivates your friend to wake up.  Why doesn't your friend just stay in bed?  Nobody likes to get out of bed, especially on these cold winter mornings, but do you know why your best mate or spouse or partner or relative wakes up and gets ready to face the world?  Do you know what they think of as soon as they wake up - a loved one, what they'll eat for breakfast, whether ysomeone will remember them today?  Do you know if they say a prayer, or curse the world? Do you know if they wake up happy, or if they feel like this will be their last day?  Let me rephrase: do you know if there's any reason why one morning, they might decide to never wake up?

People face dilemmas all the time in their everyday lives: which sandwich to eat at lunch, what tie to wear with their shirt, whether to ring someone for a chat or not.  They are all pretty mild dilemmas.  But underneath the everydayness, what are people hiding?  Do you know or have any clue about what your friend may conceal underneath their ordinary facade?  People can go through life playing out the role of someone who's perfectly content and able to deal with what's around them, but once alone, they don't act and instead come out of their costumes to allow themselves to really deal with what they've experienced.  You see the signs all the time, but you don't take any notice: the friend who has far too much alcohol in her flat, the friend who never seems to eat, or who eats too much, the friend who works-out for hours and hours, the friend who buys things that aren't needed, the friend who has an obsession with order and neatness.  We can notice these things that don't seem to fit in with a norm, but do we take action?  Do we try and find out what lies beneath it all?  Do we really get to know our friend, and try to understand what internal dilemmas they face each day?  And if you don't notice it, then will anyone help you?

The word friend is used far too freely these days.  Everyone you've ever met is suddenly your friend, anyone who adds you to facebook is someone you call your friend.  It's bollocks.  Unless you know someone to the point where you can say, "I think I know there's something wrong", or "I think there isn't any more I can understand about the way they think", then how can you call them a friend?  Equally, if you walk around blindly ignoring what's staring you in the face and screaming at you to notice it, then how can you possible be a true friend to someone.  Can anyone call you a friend?