Pins and Needles

She was the most beautiful girl in the world – what a pity they didn’t meet in less embarrassing circumstances

- CATHERINE YOUNG

LIFE just wasn’t fair, Joe decided gloomily. He’d always suspected it, but now he knew for certain. Because if life was fair he wouldn’t be sitting on the 8.35am train just minutes from a crucial job interview, with the most beautiful girl in the world opposite him and a head totally empty of witty chat-up lines. And such an acute case of pins and needles in his left foot that he was completely unable to move.

Perhaps just a little twiddle of the toes? He tried.

“Aaargh,” he croaked, trying to turn the sound into a cough. Oh, this was a disaster! He had to get off this train at the next stop. He was pushed for time, and he couldn’t see stuffy old Mr Pickett of Pickett, Reid and Murphy Ltd taking a sympathetic view of lateness due to pins and needles.

The station was looming now. Once again Joe tried to stand, and once again the movement set off an explosion of unbearable ticklishness in his foot.

“Aaargh,” he groaned again, and The Most Beautiful Girl in the World stared at him, clearly alarmed. In an effort to reassure her of his sanity, Joe flashed a pleasant hey-I’m-just-a-harmless-chapwith-pins-and-needles smile in her direction. Things were bad enough already without being mistaken for a lunatic.

THE train creaked to a halt at Joe’s stop, and a crush of people piled in. One man stabbed Joe’s tingling toes with his umbrella and almost sent him into a frenzy. Making a last bid for freedom, Joe tried to get up, but his foot stubbornly refused to take his weight. Then suddenly Miss World was by his side and a delicious cloud of Chanel No 5 was engulfing him, and she was helping him to his feet.

“Come on, you poor thing,” she said quietly, taking his arm. “Lean on me.”