I'm on the train from Edinburgh to Glasgow.
It's late on a Wednesday night.
I'm already an hour delayed, and I'm tired.
I still have seven hours of teaching to write, and even though I've been writing this teaching for about 20 hours, I'm never going to finish it by Friday.
I've made this train by literally about 15 seconds, jumped onto the last first-class carriage, and I don't have a first-class ticket.
I said to the guard, "Please, can I upgrade my ticket to sit in first class because I need to get 45 minutes of work done?" and he said, "Don't worry about it" (Things like this keep happening when I come back to Scotland, it amazes me).
He knows I need to work, so I open my laptop, but there's a guy sitting opposite the aisle to the right of me.
I make an instant judgement about him. He's scruffy, I think probably Indian, pretty cool in his day, but older now in his forties, he limps to his seat and sits down.
He's on his phone, talking a lot and running out of charge; he says he thinks he's dislocated his hip jumping over a wall; he's been arrested today as he didn't have any insurance on his car. He ran away from the police, jumped over a wall, threw his car keys away and then got arrested. He was fast accessed into court charged and has to come back on the 25th of April.
He's running out of charge on his phone; he can't phone anyone to help him with his leg.
My wife always tells me that I can't possibly understand the world through someone like Sonny's Eyes (I'll tell you how I knew his name in a minute).
She tells me I can't know what it's like to be a young black man in the city of London; I can't know what it's like to be a woman late on a bus coming home from Nottingham, worried about her safety, I can't know what it's like to be an immigrant.
But I can try.
So I change seats, and I sit opposite Sonny. I say, "Do you need to charge for your phone? He said yes, so I plugged his phone into my laptop, and we started to talk.
We talk for 40 minutes (Actually, he talks a lot).
He can't understand why he's been charged because all he did was drive without insurance, and when he got picked up by the police, he ran away and, threw his car keys in a field and jumped over a wall. He can't understand why that's doing something wrong (It's not really that wrong, is it?).
We had a great chat.
He has dogs; He's had them all his life - French Bulldogs, lots of different names, one called Chico; he lost Chico a little while ago.
We had loads of chats about his job collecting cars from different places and what it's like in London and how it's different to Glasgow, and then just for a little while, I realised just a little bit what it was like to be Sonny.
And so when I got my next train, I got my head down and worked again, but with much more of a smile on my face and much more relief at how lucky I was than I had a few minutes before.
I would never have remembered that train journey from Edinburgh to Glasgow if I hadn't met Sonny. Meeting Sonny was a gift.
Blog Post Number - 3987