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I’ve always been happy to admit that I’m suited to office life. And the train out of Lewes first thing in the morning is not dissimilar. We’re all in it together, but actually we’d like nothing more than to be left alone. Sure, we can nod and greet and exchange a few undemanding words if we happen to be behind one another in the Runaway queue. But once the train pulls in, the barricades of our respective minds are up and standing firm.
Our silence is neither unfriendly nor disrespectful, then, but just an acknowledgement of a camaraderie that doesn’t need to be oiled by talk of any kind. And perhaps this is a reason why I’ve adapted to the early-morning commute as easily as I did to a desk-bound existence. It’s the same gentle sociability with quietness positively encouraged.
But occasionally I’ve found a clique forming around me on the station platform, through nothing more calculated than the fact that each of us has made a habit of sitting in a particular carriage on a particular train. And this is fine by me, but if the companionship this engenders has the audacity to turn to banter, then I’m off to relocate to another, more appealing carriage. Until that one, too, has ideas above its station and boundaries are breached.
A car, these days, seems to be an endlessly adjustable thing: all buttons, and knobs and levers. But once you’re done with tweaking, life is sorted.
With a train seat, though, you’re never quite sorted. Firstly, there’s not nearly enough scope for adjustment, and, secondly, there are just too many unknowns, too many outside influences – in short, too much real life – for any kind of comfortable plateau ever to be reached. It’s a life of compromise in which the luxury of your own seat is just a euphemism for a temporary and unstable resting place.
Which is, I suppose, why so many of us like the car so very much. But even with a car there’s the possibility that you might be sharing the driver’s seat with a companion of different dimensions. And then what happens to those carefully orchestrated settings? It’ll be endless tussles with the mirror and jolting of the seat – those outward clues of a life lived in the endless sway of give and take.
Unless, of course, you choose to partner up with someone whose measurements match yours almost exactly. This is just what I did – a canny move, I’d say, and one which means we can each slip in and out of the driver’s seat (and in and out of each other’s shoes) with no thought for who was there last. It’s an existence of ease and simplicity on the one hand, but – on the other – perhaps not one that’s prepared me particularly well for that one-size-fits-all, rough-and-ready template of real life.
A rockfall on the line between London and Lewes isn’t your usual reason for arriving home late, but that was last week’s explanation, and that’s the great thing about modern passenger directives – they really do provide the realism with which to imbue your excuses. So information, even too much of it, is a handy thing when things go wrong.
When things go right, though, the less said the better. The commentary accompanying our progress could be worse – at least it’s only an audio, not an audio-visual, hell – but just imagine that little piece of silence which might exist, for example, if Cooksbridge and Plumpton were left to shoulder responsibility for their own shortcomings.
At least with a human at the microphone, we get inflection, variation and a filter of sorts: a godsend when the senses have been dulled and deadened by over-familiarity. So, the other week when the conductor chose to preface his remarks with ‘I know I tell you this every day but…’ I sensed, at last, an acknowledgement that we’ve been in this situation before. I’m grateful for that.
As for the scrolling equivalents of those verbal communications, they brook no human intervention, no bending to circumstance. And, worst of all, no correction. For months now, we on the 7.42 have been subjected to a typo that snags my eye at regular intervals – a hellish loop that seems beyond the sphere of human influence. If anyone from Southern is reading this, please, please could someone fix it?
I’ve always been happy to admit that I’m suited to office life. And the train out of Lewes first thing in the morning is not dissimilar. We’re all in it together, but actually we’d like nothing more than to be left alone. Sure, we can nod and greet and exchange a few undemanding words if we happen to be behind one another in the Runaway queue. But once the train pulls in, the barricades of our respective minds are up and standing firm.
