Embarking on my journey, I try to keep focussed on what I should tolerate and what I shouldn’t, what is a deliberate decision to inconvenience others and what is somebody making a mistake. Who is trying to make this situation worse and who is simply trying to get through the day? Level one – the station foyer.
In an attempt to limit the number of transactions I need to carry out which are dependent on people, I usually opt for the electronic ticket machines because the staff are capable of annoying me from the outset.
To get to the ticket booths I have to pass the display board that will inevitably tell me that the train I am here to catch is already late. I wonder constantly whether I moan too much or whether things really are just not good enough. There are people whose lives are much worse than mine, but is there really anyone in this country who never gets annoyed at late trains or litter because things could be worse? I doubt it. I am very aware that I could not hope to run a national rail service myself and so I try hard not to let minor delays bother me, but when ticket prices go up and punctuality goes down, it is difficult to maintain rationality. Fantasy retribution is all one can trust in at times.
Worse still is the fact that apologies are meted out by robotic pre-recorded voices, as so many need to be made that to employ a real person to apologise each time a service is delayed would cost thousands and would drain so much sincerity out of that person that by the time they got home they would be unable to summon any emotion even if they were to find their house had been burnt to the ground. They would simply comment that it had happened and start on their way into alternative accommodation, incapable of feeling sorry for themselves or anyone any more.
So instead, Johnny 5 waits by the public address system, ready to update customers on the fact that the 1347 Bristol Temple Meads service is stuck behind a slower-moving freight service that managed to get onto the tracks without any of the people who control the lines wondering what impact that might have on scheduled services which people have paid not insubstantial amounts of money to board.
I. Am. Sorry … For. The. In.convenience. This. Will. Cause. You.
No you are not, you are a robot, and if the cinema of the 1980s has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that robots cannot feel human emotions.
What. Is. Love? What. Is. RailReplacementBusService?
It is this very lack of emotion that makes me love computers, because there is always a reason for their malfunction – provided you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the machines you use care about you, by which I mean you do not ask your computer why it is going so slowly, do not joke that it doesn’t like Monday mornings and absolutely do not give your car a name.
Anyone who responds to a question about where to put an item from a draining board with a comment like ‘The colander lives in that cupboard there’ needs help. Colanders and tin openers do not live anywhere; they do not live at all. They do not choose to let you down; they simply break. Machines break and that is a fact and if you waste your time thinking that this is part of some wider scheme then you are never going to get through the day and you will never achieve what you could. Now if you were to break your tin opener through misuse or lose it through carelessness then that is a different matter. People live – save your emotion for them.
The fast ticket machine therefore offers a wonderful chance to collect one’s ticket without having to confront another person who might be upset or grumpy or might just take a dislike to your face or necktie that makes them want to serve you poorly. Or so it should be, until you are unfortunate enough to join a queue which has formed behind someone who has clearly not only never used a fast ticket machine before, but has never used any piece of equipment invented after 1950, as I just have.
Some people have an awesome skill for remaining oblivious to the fact that they are in the way, as if they see their peripheral vision as an optional extra to their tunnel vision, to be saved for best and not worn out when not needed.
Don’t get me wrong, I can find myself in the way as well as anybody on the planet, but as with so many problems, admitting that you are a sufferer is half the battle. I have learned over time that should I need to abandon my trolley whilst shopping to run back for a forgotten bulb of garlic, then you can be sure that whatever I park it in front of will suddenly be required by somebody. Even if I park my wagon adjacent to the shelf containing dolphin-unfriendly tuna chunks pickled in their own piss, then within moments there will be a run on them by every shopper in a two-hundred-metre radius.
I’m so good at stimulating interest in a product that I should be paid by the supermarkets to help them shift slower lines. All this said, I do what I can to minimise the effect my condition has on others by leaving my trolley somewhere as inconspicuous as possible and by returning to it as quickly as possible, apologising if I can see I have inconvenienced anyone in the process.
The man I am now watching attempt to extract his train ticket from a machine he does not understand is the train-station equivalent of two people having a tedious conversation in the middle of a shopping aisle with their trolleys side by side, at right angles to the shelving like a police roadblock.
Sorry you can’t get to the baked beans right now – there has been an incident ahead and I’m gathering evidence from Maggie here about Len’s vasectomy.
I am wondering why the person behind him doesn’t step forward to offer assistance when it becomes clear that he is already seeking help from whomever he is talking to on the phone. Proving my theory that relationships serve only to halve the responsibility people take for themselves, he has called his wife to see if she can help with the predicament in which he now finds himself. How a man so incompetent finds a partner I will never know but I mustn’t be sexist, as women are equally capable of incompetence as men so they may well prove to be two identically inept peas in a festering pod of ignorance.
Annoyed, I decide to brave the desk after all and regret my earlier judgement. The lady who serves me is polite, smiles broadly and is as efficient as I could have hoped for. She wishes me a safe journey and unwittingly guilt-trips me into wanting to go and apologise to the man at the ticket machine for the horrible thoughts I had about him, no doubt a result of my own internal frustrations.
When I turn to go through the gate, that man is still on the phone to his wife, who is probably shouting random numbers and letters into the ear of a husband I am sure she hoped to have an afternoon without. Having painted him as a cartoon villain I now see into the eyes set deep into his face, beneath a pair of heavy, tired eyebrows. His eyes look startled and afraid, the eyes of a great ape who has only ever known life in a cage, meals provided and medical intervention in case of illness, who has then been thrown out on to the busy street to fend for himself – it isn’t that he is unaware that he is in the way at all, he is simply absolutely unsure of everything.
His mind is screaming at him in a language he doesn’t speak and he looks as though all he wants to do is crawl into a corner of the ticket hall and suck his thumb. Still I cannot help but think that if he didn’t have a wife he would have been forced to address the need to fend for himself before now, but in thinking that I realise I am jealous more than anything else. I am not oblivious to the fact that his fate will befall me sooner or later and I will reach an age at which no one would ever believe that it was once me who was in a rush to get somewhere.
I used to have meetings you know! In London and everything! is what I will cry to the people who rush by me on either side, tutting their disgust at my continued existence.
Whatever, granddad – go back to sleep.
I might have a chance at being a granddad now after all, just maybe. But don’t get too far ahead of yourself – she will think that odd. Just concentrate on today, get the things right that you can and allow the rest of your life to click easily into place.
50004. 0000000000004. 4GOTTEN.
Private Jonny is starting to whisper inside my head.
Do you think
that book you want to write about not having a girlfriend and being a compulsive weirdo is going to change things for the better, or are you nailing shut your own coffin? Talk to me!
I look up at the display and check which platform I need: platform 3, which is along the tunnel that goes under the track and then up the stairs on the right. Most people follow the signs leading to the left but experience has taught me that heading right avoids the crowds and brings me out closer to where the quiet carriage will be when the train arrives. One nil to me.
I have long thought that the problem with public transport is that there is far too much of the former doing far too little of the latter, and once on the train this proves to be exactly the case. My carriage is typical of most on the train in that it is full (except up in first class, of course, where money buys you dignity not afforded to the urchins who paid a meagre fifty pounds for their ticket; we get what we deserve). Not quite full to standing, or I might have felt pressure to stand myself, but with all seats taken.
Although the grammatically execrable train manager’s announcement makes it clear that this is the quiet carriage, somehow there appears to be an unwritten agreement that the rules no longer apply once the train is so busy that people are forced to sit here who might ordinarily have been sat elsewhere. This makes absolutely no difference as far as I am concerned. Just as most decent people stop to put on trousers before running out of a hotel in the case of a fire alarm because the rules of decency that apply in society take precedence over the inconvenience – people would rather die than expose their genitals to a stranger – so here, the quiet carriage remains the quiet carriage, whatever your reason for being inside it. The noise in this carriage is certainly no worse than in any other carriage, but the stickers on the wall remind us of the fact that this should be a haven, and serve only to further frustrate those of us who are obeying the rules, in much the same way that a speed limit sign warning you not to exceed 50 mph is an infuriating tease when you’re sat motionless in traffic.
In spite of all this, the young man next to me – wearing a smart grey suit but with a piercing through his lower lip and his hair infuriatingly flopping down over one eye, as if using two is some sort of conformist weakness – is listening to what I suppose he considers to be music. I am having the thoughts of a man thrice my actual age, but what difference does it make if they are the right ones?
In the fantasy inside my head I pull his headphones out from his ears and lean menacingly into him, whispering:
Listen to me, you ignorant little piece of shit, turn your fucking music down and listen to the voice inside your head. This rap music you are listening to makes you believe that you are oppressed and beaten down and capable of so much more if only ‘they’ would let you express yourself, but ‘they’ do not exist. Whatever shitty little job you do in your shitty little suit is part of it, the little packed lunch you have in your bag down there is part of it and the rules of this carriage on the train are part of it. ‘They’ are us, we are them and if you really hate society then go and live in a fucking cave by the sea, but if you want to earn money and ride on trains and eat at McDonald’s then you are a fucking part of it.
I don’t say anything, though. I just rehearse the speech over and over in my head and it escalates with each repetition and grows more and more violent until five minutes into the journey I am imagining myself tapping him on the shoulder, then as he turns around I grab his face in the palm of my hand and drive his head backwards through the window. The severity of this image shocks even me and I shudder slightly at the thought of it. He is probably not much older than twenty and even if it takes him another twenty years to learn to behave better then he will be a positive influence on the planet for another forty years. Right now he is just someone stuck in a job he hates listening to some music. Calm down, Jon.
But I’m tired of calming myself down. Isn’t it the case that if his music weren’t too loud then I wouldn’t have been angry in the first place. I can rationalise it all I like but I am suffering at the hands of people behaving less well than myself. I have heard people arguing with ticket inspectors enforcing the quiet carriage’s rules that the sound of a person talking on their phone is no louder than two people having a conversation, but that really isn’t the point.
Aside from how annoying it is having to listen to half a conversation and piece together the rest, the fact remains that the use of mobile phones is forbidden. I can’t stand being around people who challenge every rule on principle because they think it makes them a more interesting person. We do not live in a dictatorship, your civil liberties are not at risk and rules are in place to protect not punish the majority of us; however much of a square it makes me I don’t see why we can’t just assume that rules are in place for a reason and follow them silently until given a valid reason to do otherwise. I won’t bring kids into a world where people act so defiantly in their own self-interest.
If the sign says using your phone may interfere with equipment then maybe it does; if the pilot says keep your seatbelt on until the plane has come to a complete halt then keep your fucking seatbelt on! I will die a happy man if just once I am on a plane that is forced to stop suddenly on the runway and all the cocky business twats and pig-faced holidaymakers who had to get up and stretch their varicose-vein-ridden legs are thrown forward into a big pile of broken bones and flesh because they know which rules apply to them and which are here to keep them down.
Many people are listening to loud music or talking on their phones – someone went first and nobody spoke up so now several have followed. There is one man I can see at a table further down the aisle who I am just itching to hate more than the others. I know for a fact that he is, over and above his phone conversation, a total penis; I just can’t work out exactly why just yet. My ragedar is drawn to him nonetheless and is beeping like crazy.
There is something definitely worse about this man than all the others, something other than the fact he has sunglasses on top of his head inside on a clearly dark and dank afternoon. Something in his eyes tells me that he feels as if he is superior to all of us and the drama he expresses during his conversation is clearly a performance mostly for our benefit.
The way he keeps rubbing his eyes as if in slow motion in the midst of his conversation is particularly annoying. It is the sort of thumb and two-finger pinching towards the bridge of the nose action that put upon police chiefs use in films like Beverly Hills Cop and is clearly an entirely learned mannerism. There is no natural instinct to do this, it serves no purpose, but is merely something that people see in films and subconsciously decide to do in public so that everyone around can be made aware of how put upon they are by the constant dithering of the morons they have been put in charge of. I think cinema has made us all act out the drama in our lives far more than we used to in the days before there was a television in every house.
The default position for the human face is pretty much blank, eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance, mouth slightly ajar but still and eyebrows unmoving. This is never shown in films though because in films something must always be happening, actors are paid to act or react to whatever drama is unfolding and so we are much more accustomed to seeing eyebrows raised or furrowed, nostrils pinched together and mouths open with shock. We crave a sense that we are somehow important and in a bid to make our own lives feel noteworthy we react in a similar way to the news in the coffee shop that there are no more ginger biscuits, rather than accept that this is an almost irrelevant piece of news.
I remember as a child I used to skip a little before I started running because I had seen people doing it in films. Rather than just set off running, I would look over my left shoulder, look at my watch, do a little skip and then run. I suppose I thought it made you run faster and look cooler. It didn’t and I grew out of it.
It’s not true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, since that is precisely why covers are put on books, to allow you to better understand the cont
ents without going to the bother of reading them in their entirety. If this man were a book he would be called An Idiot’s Guide to Acting like a Total Wanker in Mundane Situations.
It probably doesn’t help that the man on his phone is good looking, and clearly wearing a very expensive suit, though I can’t help but think to myself that if he were that important he wouldn’t be squashed into a standard-class carriage, would he? Important people don’t have to rush or get stressed, because the things they are on their way to wait for them. This show of stress is for our benefit, not his, but people are buying it.
I think the same when I see people speeding through rough areas of shit-hole towns; what meeting could someone driving a lowered Vauxhall Nova with what looks like a catering-size tin of beans for an exhaust possibly be late for in a dump like this? Don’t want to miss the McDonald’s breakfast? People speed to convince themselves that their lives are of some sort of significance and people overdress for the same reason. It’s safe to say that despite never having spoken to him and not knowing so much as his first name, I hate him. Never mind the new effort I am supposed to be making to be a better person for Gemma or for anyone else, this man is a wanker and it seems that up to now only I know it.
It's Not Me, It's You Page 16
