Top tips for harmonious commuting.....

Below are a few tips for commuters to have a harmonious journey and avoid irritating your fellow man to the point of homicide….

1. Always, but always, carry a hanky or tissues. Even if you do not have a cold, your nose can run for all sorts of reasons and they are useful for mopping up spilled coffee, too.

2. Turn off the annoying beep which happens when you push the buttons on your mobile. You may have your headphones on, but we can hear it.

3. Turn your music down. I don’t care if hip hop, techno, garage and rap are best played at ear splitting volume. I don’t like it, and I don’t want to listen to it.

4. Do not try to walk across a crowded concourse whilst texting, scrolling through your music list or messages or continuing to read your ipad, kindle, book or newspaper. Put your head up and LOOK WHERE YOU ARE GOING!

5. If you must stand in the doorway of the train or tube, GET OUT OF THE WAY when it reaches a station so others can get on or off.

6. Do not squeeze yourself between other people that have had the courtesy to remove their rain soaked coats without taking yours off too.

7. Do not use up all the miserable allocation of table space with your laptop, newspaper or ridiculously large tote bag. Those facilities are there for all of us, and I want my share.

8. Do not stop immediately at the top or bottom of flights of stairs and gaze round aimlessly. There are about a thousand people behind you, all trying to get up/down/out/in. If you are lost, stand to one side, find a map or ask someone in a lurid fluorescent jacket for help. Similarly, do not dawdle – YOU ARE IN THE WAY.

9. Do not brush your long, flicky hair on the crowded train so that hair, dandruff and God knows what goes all over other people. It’s unhygienic. Either wait until you get to work, or get up two minutes earlier and do it at home.

10. Do not converse loudly either to a friend or on the phone about intimate, personal information or brag about your latest business deal or how important you are. It is embarrassing and frankly, you are not that interesting. Try to be discreet.

Finally, and this is the ultimate tip of all about commuting, if you can avoid it, DON’T DO IT!

A waste of my life

My commute took me almost three hours this morning. That, quite frankly, is ridiculous. I could get to southern Europe in the time it took me to get from Bletchingley to Kensington, if you cut out the hanging about at the airport.

Problems this morning were numerous, so much so that a list is called for:-

1.    The train was late getting to Oxted

2.    There was a signalling equipment failure at Clapham Junction (the busiest station in England), which held up everything going everywhere

3.    Someone was very inconsiderately taken ill on a train at Clapham too, compounding the problems

4.    There was a fire at Victoria underground, so the tube station was closed

5.    About a million extra people were trying to cram on the buses, so the queues were enormous

6.    I had a heavy rucksack, so didn’t want to walk all the way

7.    There are road works in Knightsbridge (again)

8.    There was an accident by the Albert Hall and the police shut the road temporarily.

It was a complete and total catalogue of disasters!

As you will know if you read this regularly, I hate commuting. On a good day it takes in excess of three hours (ie 90 minutes each way) and usually it’s nearer four. But to take almost three hours to go one way, into one of the most well served cities in the world for public transport, is ludicrous as well as being a complete waste of my life and time.

I am just building up the energy to make the journey home. Hopefully they will have sorted out the signals, put out the fire and there won’t be any problems on the road at the homeward end. And to be fair, problems over the past few months have been minimal so this is the first time I have been seriously inconvenienced for ages. The frustration comes, I think, from not being able to do anything about it (and being stuck next to the most irritating girl in the world on the train who talked in a penetrating nasal voice to her friends the whole way up to London).

I am equipped for the journey now – sweets, bottle of water, magazine, ipod and a game on my Blackberry which I am getting quite good at and achieving very high scores (it’s so absorbing I nearly missed my stop the other night).

Girding the loins – off we go!

Irrational hatred? It's normal!

Each and every day, I develop a deep and irrational hatred for at least one of my fellow commuters.

I don’t think I am alone in this; I see other people staring with baleful looks at certain individuals for a wide variety of reasons.

Today, it was a young woman with a permanent case of the sniffs. She was well dressed, immaculately made up and reading an ‘intelligent’ magazine (The Economist, if you must know). And she sniffed, constantly and with great vigour. It made a rich bubbling sound reminiscent of a stew in a saucepan or a rapidly boiling kettle and conjured up pictures of volcanic green lava just about to erupt and spray all around. It was, quite frankly, disgusting.

I did toy with the idea of giving her a pack of Olbas oil soaked tissues, without which I never travel, and expressing sympathy for her obviously imminent demise due either to raging bird flu or possibly suffocation due to her inability to blow her stuffed up nose, but to be honest I wasn’t sure how that would be received and no one ever speaks to each other on the morning train.

I’m amazed that my piercing stare didn’t register on her consciousness, but then perhaps she was so stuffed up with mucus that her brain was clogged and nothing would penetrate it short of a nuclear blast. I spent a considerable portion of the journey staring at her smug face wishing she could be rocketed into oblivion (along with the irritating pissed woman who sat behind me on the plane on the way home from Greece the other night) never to return.

Don’t these people learn manners at their mother’s knee? When I was a child it was drummed into me that to indulge in anti social and irritating personal habits in public was simply unacceptable, and if you had a runny nose you got yourself a hanky (not a tissue in those days) and you blew your nose. Not all parents were successful – I was at infants school with a boy who ate his own bogies in class – but by and large we all learned that you keep your filthy habits to yourself and if you must, you indulged in private bogie feasting instead of public.

I have blogged before of course about how other people seem to lack even the most basic consideration of others. I mentioned above an annoying woman who sat behind me on the Easyjet flight from Heraklion last weekend. She was mildly pissed as is always the danger with late night flights when people have been out to dinner or to the bar at the airport, and behaved like a five year old all the way home. She played with the tray table, had her music on ludicrously loud (I could hear it above my own ipod and the plane’s engines) and sang along tunelessly in a low voice but certainly loud enough for me to hear it. She kept up an ongoing commentary throughout the flight (bear in mind we took off at 11.35pm and landed at Gatwick at 2am local time and you will understand how irritating that was) and whenever the captain banked or she felt the plane do a manoeuvre went ‘whee’. I did think about turning round and complaining, but when I looked she had a husband built like a brick shit-house with wall to wall tattoos, so I thought better of it and quietly seethed all the way home.

But sniffing gets to me every time. Speaking as someone who has had her fair share of suffering with nasal problems, I know there is no excuse for it; I mean tissues aren’t exactly hard to find, are they? If I have to sit opposite her tomorrow, my hatred will be multiplied ten fold and I will take my Olbas tissue and ram it so far up her nostrils it may come out of her ear.

Bet you’d like to be there to see that!

Commuting. Bet there's more to add to this list.

Ten things I hate about commuting:-

1.        People who talk too loudly on their mobile phones

2.        People who listen to their music too loudly, so I can hear it too

3.        People who sit next to you in soaking wet coats

4.        People who sniff

5.        People who eat very smelly food that makes the carriage stink for hours

6.        People who insist on walking along the platform trying to text or still to read their book/newspaper

7.        People who are total strangers but try to talk to you (usually old!)

8.        People who are too fat for their seat, and squash across onto yours

9.        It’s unreliable, overcrowded and expensive (actually that’s three, but never mind)

10.     It’s such a waste of time!

Ten things I like about commuting

1.        You can read (you can’t if you are driving a car)

2.        You can sleep (ditto)

3.        It requires very little thought / effort to do it

4.        You can listen to your favourite music without car sharers asking for something else

5.        You can blame late arrivals/early departures vaguely on ‘the trains’

6.        It’s a little bit of ‘me’ time for line learning, thinking about life etc

7.        You can eat pretty much anything (but see aforementioned comment about smelly food, and try eating a take away Chinese whilst driving the car!)

8.        Can’t think of anything else (amazed I thought of seven!)

9.        Ditto

10.     Ditto

Suicide or selfish

I am one of the ranks of harried commuters that put up with the vagaries of the train system day after day. When I took my job, I anticipated being a commuter for a couple of years - so far I've worked there almost seven years!

Yesterday, on the way home, it was chaos. Someone had jumped on the track from a bridge between Clapham and Croydon and must have been sprayed everywhere by an express train, because the whole network in that area was at a halt.

I have never understood why you would take your own life. It has always seemed to me that for an adult that does not have a mental illness (and therefore by implication is fully in control of their actions), suicide is the ultimate in selfish acts. It devastates those you leave behind and doesn't really solve anything except for the person that does it. The fallout lasts far longer than a death by natural causes or accident. And to commit such an act in a way that inconveniences thousands of others really pisses me off.

Don't get me wrong; I don't underestimate the despair that financial difficulties or failed relationships can bring. I have been pretty low with both problems myself at some stage or another of my life. But always, at the back of my mind even in my lowest moments, has been the knowledge that in many ways I have much to celebrate in my life. My children, my resilience, my health and my ability to make success out of nothing, even if it takes a while. When the whole world seemed to be against me, there was always something and I wouldn't have made my family suffer by imposing the guilt they would feel if I had topped myself.

Whoever it was that jumped, well I'm sorry for your trouble but actually, not as sorry as I could have been if you'd been less selfish, sought some help and sorted things out with people that care about you or in the remote chance you don't have any of those, proper professionals. You may have felt you had nothing to live for, and you have now shared that feeling with your family. And inconvenienced about half a million people in the doing. Well done.