I should know better

Coming home in the pouring rain from a shopping expedition, I caught a bus I don`t usually get. As I sat enjoying the scenery a little man leaned over and asked,

"Mata- lan?"

I thought, and said I was fairly sure that the bus did pass Matalan, though it was beyond my stop.

The wee woman sitting opposite was sure it didn`t.

"Ask the driver," I suggested.

"Driver no use. Driver Polish. I Lithuanian - not speak Polish."

The Wee Woman stood up to her full five foot one. Full of optimism, she asked,

"Anyone on the bus speak Polish?"

There were six of us on the bus. The two at the back spoke up. "We Bosnian, we not know Pole speak."

The one in the middle beamed with delight. "You Lithuanian also?"

The mathemtically minded among you will have worked out that the Wee Woman and I were in a significant minority here. As we gazed at each other in some surprise, the two Lithuanians began a fervent conversation in which a word very like "Polski" was repeated with varying vicious-sounding epithets and sour glances at the driver.

I have no Lithuanian and exactly one word of Polish, which is "zloty", and didn`t seem too relevant. I was happy to bow out of this exercise in multiculturalism and get off at my stop. The bus sailed on into the rain, a rolling international incident.

As the Wee Woman said, "It`s no so much where they come from, it`s why the hell the poor souls ended up here?"