My lunchtime spat with the beloved quite put out of my mind the intention of a few words on yesterday's trip to London. Not a usual event, as I imagine you will have gathered and if I had my way it would be rarer than the proverbial hen's teeth. Can't abide the place, nor in truth do I much care the inescapable feeling that I must have 'Naive countryman' scrawled on my forehead.

But needs must and to town for a 'Ways Forward' shindig at Palais de Lambeth. (Why not a session on 'Ways Back When' one of these days I ask?) Time was when the dog-collar was a handy device for ensuring a modicum of civilised behaviours from the S&G locals - if not exactly guaranteeing a seat on the Tube, at least you would not expect to harried or hectored by strangers. (Clerical deference is no bad thing for either party methinks. Laity benefits from feeling if not actually being pious and clergy get left alone, which is all they ask in public places.)

Sadly these days are far behind us and yesterday was one cavalry charge of rudeness after another. Standing harmlessly on the Circle line platform at Liverpool Street, I was as astonished as upset when a man intent on his train pushed right through me as if I wasn't there. His eyes were as blank as the mad or the drugged - he may have been either or both though I suspect he was as sober and sane as any average commuter - and when we made bruising body contact there was simply no registering that he had felt a thing. He was to all intents and purposes insensate, a robotic 'droid.

The one clear sense I did feel from him though was anger - a generalised rather than a particular anger. He was angry with me for being there, but he was just angry in itself. He was as possessed by anger as some men are by the devil. If it were a sin then this was truly deadly for he was deadened. But I wouldn't rush to judge - Hunter Thompson did not write of 'Fear and Loathing' without reason: when you are afraid then fear turns to anger - impotent rage rather - at what threatens, and if you don't know exactly what does actually threaten then the rage has to be at everything just in case that one thing is the threat itself.

So was it just simply modern urban life that scared him so? Possibly, though I have no recent experience on which to base analysis. If though he were afraid of hurrying towards a hideous death, blown to pieces in a darkened tunnel lit only by the blaze of the blast that destroys him, then I too know that fear. There are places the rattling Tube runs through that are scarred and haunted by the horror of last year. They are too, in their way, sacred places because God was there in those very tunnels - hoping, healing and loving - in the moments of devastation and death. I passed through one of those places yesterday and my head was bowed in prayer and in fear.

I don't think we in the Wolds have any idea of what it was to be in London that day, but I'm sure that my angry, hurrying man does.

And so to prayer.