James O'Brien

It’s amazing who you meet on the train.

You sit down and see the people opposite you and you have two choices.

You can either ignore them (or stare at them as I saw a young woman do with a homeless man the other night on the way back from Cronulla) or you can engage.

I’ve just arrived home from the World Masters Games at Homebush.

Sitting with a colleague, we noticed a couple of older women debating which train station they had just gone through.

When we confirmed it was Strathfield and they still had plenty of time to wait before getting of at Central, we got a smile of “thanks” and opening up of the conversation.

The two women were from Vancouver, and were here competing in Athletics.

The young woman I’d estimate to be about 70 years old. The older, the 90 year old, was, we discovered, the first person to win a gold medal at the games. I’m no expert at sport, but her specialty was something to do with throwing a big lump of metal through the air over a long distance.

Also tonight, we got chatting to a really nice bloke involved in the kayaking.

Formerly from South Africa, he has been in Australia for many years. Nonetheless he keeps in touch with current events back there, and had some interesting observations to make.

He’s currently reading a biography of Alan Paton, a South African author and liberal political activist, and said it was a good read, and a good insight into how South Africa went down a particular path, but could have gone down another.

But of course the highlight of the afternoon/evening was having a good close up look at Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark who attended the function we were at this evening.

In real life, he’s a little more slight than I expected. I was half expecting a taller man, but in reality I think he’s only slightly taller than I am.

He arrived about half way through the function, and even though he arrived at about seven o’clock this morning was looking remarkably cogent. Still, I’m guessing he flew first class and not cattle-class like most of us do.

And of course, he’s dead sexy. :)