The woman, who looked to be around 60, had neatly brushed hair, was wearing a dark red sweater, a pair of glasses and holding something in her hands which as I got closer I saw was something like embroidery.
Some kind of needlework equipment, wool or yarn.
Sitting there in her fold out chair, with her needlework, the woman looked as if she might be on a seaside holiday.
Or that she might enjoying a quiet afternoon listening to the radio while her husband was out watching the football with his pals.
Except she was sat on a foldout chair in an underpass, a freeway full of motoring humans speeding away above her.
And shopping trolleys were parked all along the wall of the underpass and there were empty food boxes, plastic soft drink bottles, overflowing bins and, as the day was already hot and blowy, the intermittent odour of human urine on the dusty wind.
'Oh, look, I said to myself as I cycled uphill against that pissy wind, 'this must be what they call the American Dream.'
