'Everything happens for a reason'.

This morning entailed a bus journey and me nursing my 5th hangover of the working week.

I was acutely aware of the 'imago horribilus' of my fermenting features.

I looked like alchohol someone who had experimented with Botox with a do it yourself kit, ultimately only managing to inflate ones own face.

This in mind, despite the misery of attempting to catch a morning bus and the gymnastic one footed stance required to sqeeze into my allotted centimeter square (a right of the londoner), I carried with me a sympathy for my fellow passengers endurance of my presence.

However, there is always one person who insists on approaching the boundaries of tolerance, then burns the boundary, invades your space and claims it for their own is there not?

In this instance the protagonist of my pompous huffing was a South African lady making a phone call at incredible volumes. The volume itself was a mere trifle, her piercing accent a light clip around the ear and the dullness of her responses nothing more than a barely noticable headache cureable with a quick popping of a 16pence paracetamol....

...Her crime was far more sinster, a lurker of a crime, the type of crime that should rest naked in the cold, damp, dripping corner of a medieval dungeon, fed only with rats and mouldy bread.

She finished almost every sentence of her conversation with the remark, 'Every thing happens for a reason'.

Be sure that it does, but i fail to see how this oral parping can be tolerated. A statement designed to console or explain, but offering none of the necessary facets or functionality required to achieve these things save to be open to interpretation. The extended reach and purpose of this abomination is that the woman has not formulated an opinion on what is being said to her. She has been presented with a problem by someone in need, glanced into the dusty cupboard of her mind and lazily hurled out, 'Every thing happens for a reason'.

I hardly think that a survivor of a Tsunami would be greatly comforted by the sentiment, nor indeed the actual reason.

Most tsunamis are caused by earthquakes generated in a subduction zone, an area where an oceanic plate is being forced down into the mantle by plate tectonic forces. The friction between the subducting plate and the overriding plate is enormous. This friction prevents a slow and steady rate of subduction and instead the two plates become "stuck". As the stuck plate continues to descend into the mantle the motion causes a slow distortion of the overriding plage. The result is an accumulation of energy very similar to the energy stored in a compressed spring. Energy can accumulate in the overriding plate over a long period of time - decades or even centuries. Energy accumulates in the overriding plate until it exceeds the frictional forces between the two stuck plates. When this happens, the overriding plate snaps back into an unrestrained position. This sudden motion is the cause of the tsunami - because it gives an enormous shove to the overlying water. At the same time, inland areas of the overriding plate are suddenly lowered. The moving wave begins travelling out from where the earthquake has occurred. Some of the water travels out and across the ocean basin, and, at the same time, water rushes landward to flood the recently lowered shoreline.

So there you go. Your family is dead. Your house destroyed. The family pet missing presumed searching for his bone, never to find to it, eventually becoming stuck in a rabbit hole and starving to death. Worry not though, because as a South African lady on the number 243 once told me, 'everything happens for a reason'.

Unfortunately, I spent such a lavish amount of time and energy chewing on this wasp, that the insufferbale journey was over before I knew it, leaving a real window of opportunity for this woman with an elbow instead of a brain, to with reasonable cause suggest to me that, indeed, 'everything happens for a reason'.