I had a couple of encounters with strangers in the last 24 hours or so that made me
think about ways to get a good response from someone, and ways not to.

#1. I was coming through a crowded Victoria on Monday night, in a hurry to get to training after work. I had to move to avoid someone in the crowd near the barriers, and accidentally caught someone's foot with mine as I did so. I felt the contact, but it wasn't hard, so I didn't say sorry, and just kept moving. Then I heard someone swear behind me, so I turned round and looked back. This middle aged fat guy said to me 'are you alright?' in an aggressive way. So I said 'yeah', and he said 'well fucking walk
somewhere else then'. If I'd said 'or you will do what, exactly?', I just know he would have tried to clatter me. Instead I didn't reply, turned my back and kept going. But what I should have done, really, was either just say 'oops, sorry', to start with, and that would have mollified him, or ignored him swearing and kept going. Instead, because
I reacted, it got quite close to escalating into a totally stupid fight and left us both with a negative impression of each other.

#2. Now, today, I was on the train home, reading the paper, and noticed the guy in the seat next to me was availing himself of my newspaper. There was a time when I might have got pissed of with that, too. Instead (I was reading a story on how diet affects behaviour), I looked up and said to him, 'Interesting stuff eh, you are what you eat and all that'. And we ended up having a very interesting conversation about food and society that lasted all the way home, pretty much, talking about government policy, education, cookery, and so on. Rather than disappearing up my own ego, I'd reached out to someone else, and the outcome was gratifyingly positive; we both went away thinking, gosh, isn't the world full of nice intelligent people.

There's got to be a lesson in there somewhere, eh.