Real life

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.