I was about 13 at the time and on a family vacation. My parents were in a store shopping and I was bored so I went to stand outside. I’m standing out there and this very old, very fat, very short man (he looked a lot like Danny devito) walks up to me and says “Aren’t you just the cutest.” He then pinches my cheek and walks away. I’ll never forget him.

I was on a National Express coach from Newcastle to Edinburgh, years ago, and a couple stops in this guy stows a mountain bike in the luggage compartment, gets on the bus and it’s pretty full so he ends up sitting next to me.

We chatted for the whole trip, he was telling me about how he’d just spent the last couple of days biking across the country, it was just a really nice pleasant encounter with no awkwardness or anything, which as you can imagine since I’m on Lemmy is not a normal occurrence for me.

At one point I started to feel travel sick, which I think freaked him out a bit at first, but I’d come prepared with some minty sweets to keep it at bay which I of course shared with my new friend.

He got off the coach before we reached Edinburgh, and I remember sitting there watching him retrieve his bike and wave up at me to say goodbye, and I realised…we never even introduced ourselves. Like, not even first names. And I don’t know if it was the mild delirium of the travel sickness but I was just hit with this wave of existential realisation that I’d never see this person again ever in my life.

It wasn’t a romantic thing or anything, he was just canny and it’s weird we didn’t exchange any info!

I think about National Express Bike Bloke on a fairly regular basis. Hope he’s had a happy life.