You will never walk alone
In forty minutes I pass as many people out walking. Some are, in the most simple sense of the word, alone. All are engaged in conversation. The ones who seem at a glance to be solitary walk with their heads slightly inclined, elbow cocked to bring one hand up to an ear (usually the left one), and they chatter into their palms and their fingertips. The very well-equipped have headsets, and not even the posture of their shoulders betrays that they are--mentally--elsewhere, though the voice does when you get near enough.
Physically they inhabit space as if they were both participants in the conversation. They take up the whole sidewalk with their unhurriedness, their obliviousness to their dim and leafy surroundings, a slightly drunked meander and the odd emphatic gesture (for the benefit of the clairvoyant or clairaudient?). They remind me of Oslo's four-in-the-morning crowd making its way from the nightclubs north and west through the palace grounds towards the dormitories, trailing second-hand smoke and belches smelling of Hansa, Tuborg, Carlsberg.
I presume these garrulous walkers to be sober, their weaving a by-product of taking part in conversation not strongly tied to the space through which they move. They lurch and sway a little, as if leaning on a companion who is quick to steady them, but that companion is elsewhere, the interlocutor. The streamers floating on the air behind them are purely verbal and have no scent detectable to me, the runner trying to squeeze by on the left, the right, no the left -- Heya! Can I get by? Thanks.
They jump to one side and keep talking.
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