Tallerists - 0, Me - 2

Oh yes!

After a couple of months of successfully avoiding any run-ins with the dreaded tallerists - today we met again.

Picture the scene: a busy London rail station during rush hour... lots of people scurrying about trying their best to catch connecting trains in their desperate bids to get home.

Lots of small people, tall people, tallerists (Tall people with no concept of social etiquette or consideration of smaller people), and of course me: the champion of the cause for petite people everywhere!

Happily humming away to 'Kick Push' (anyone spot the problem yet?) by Lupe Fiasco, I was purposefully strolling along, safe in the knowledge that I had a good 7 minutes before my train would depart. All my carefully laid plans had paid off, life was good.

Out of the corner of my eye (here we go again), I spy a tallerist headed my way. Why did this one stand out from the others? His face was back-to-front.

Quite simply, he was looking the other way, behind him in fact... his body was directed towards me - which is where his feet were carrying him, but his nose and eyes were focused on something 165 degrees in the other direction.

My 'tallerist radar' can spot these muppets a mile off. Why? Cos I just know they're gonna walk into me. People tend to think that I am exaggerating when I rant about these scenarios - but just the other day I happened to be walking next to a normal sized colleague and she witnessed firsthand as a tallerist ploughed straight into me.

"Didn't he see you?" she asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
I rolled my eyes and muttered something like 'ya see what I been saying all this time?' Stupse.

Anyway, here was my radar beeping like crazy, and here's me - analysing the way the crowd is moving, seeking a path to safety, a way out of ANY kind - and finding none... so I assume the brace position.

No. I didn't curl up into a fetal ball like a millipede...
Instead, I pulled myself up straight and puffed my chest out, so that if I was a porcupine all my quills would have been standing on end.

I didn't speed up, nor did I slow down. By now Redman's 'Time for Some Aksion' was blasting through my ears - alongside my alert system screaming "brace! brace!" as the tallerist with the back -to-front face bears down on me.

Just before impact, I have time to wonder how Back-to-Front face man has managed to walk in a straight line without once looking at where he was going...

The collision wasn't nearly as bad as I'd expected.
It only slightly knocked me off my previous trajectory, AND I landed on my feet, as if I'd merely jumped over a can of paint.
It didn't even knock my headphones out of my ears!

The tallerist didn't fare so well.
I put on my back-to-front face (a trick I'd learned from him) and looked over my shoulder to see whether he'd survived... all I could see was a crumpled mass with eyeballs on top that were looking at me in bewilderment.

Bewilderment that turned to misdirected fury as I threw my head back and cackled... all the way down the platform.

Why?

Amidst that crumpled mass of flesh and bone, I'd noticed something.

His head was finally facing forward.