In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the protagonist, Hans Castorp, visits a cousin in an Alpine sanatorium. At first, Castorp observes the inmates and their strange, insular ways with an amused indulgence. He is, after all, a tourist and he can return home whenever he likes. Yet he stays. He begins to feel slightly ill. He gives up cigars. He stays on. He feels worse; and eventually becomes a patient. It’s a kind of horror story. In the thin air, the things that made Castorp an individual in the town are worn away by the institution.
The 7.07am train from Leighton Buzzard to Euston is my magic mountain. I live in Buckinghamshire and work in London. After a while, I became sick of driving and decided to take the train instead – as a day-tripper, not as a commuting man. Weeks passed. Still not a commuting man. The vexations of commuting life, the delays, the breakdowns, the long, unexplained halts in the middle of the countryside – they were more exotic than annoying. I could always go back to driving.
Even when I got an annual first-class season ticket – a commitment of some £6,000 – I still shunned the c-word. True, I was a statistical trend. The market share for national rail travel rose from 3.3 per cent in 1996 to 4.9 per cent by 2007 – I had become one of the 43 per cent of people who now used the train to get to work. But, no, I still wasn’t a commuter. A fairly regular traveller, perhaps. A frequent user of trains, yes. But emphatically not a commuting creature. Sure, I got into the habit of arriving at the office, tapping my watch and saying, “one hour 13 minutes door-to-door – not bad, eh?” – not something I remember doing when I lived in Wandsworth. Then I began to get horribly fidgety as 5.30pm came along. One day, it just came out. “Look, I know this meeting is important, but I HAVE to get the 18.13. It’ll just have to wait.” Commuting man picked up his bag and left.
. . .
We are the most paradoxical of creatures. I am a commuting man; hence I don’t like commuting men. Of course, I have nothing against them – us – individually. That’s because what individuality they – we – have leaves us when we leave the station car park. In the close air of the carriage, irritation spreads like a contagion. Of all human types, commuting man is the most sensitive to other human failings; and – next paradox – we all possess an equal power to irritate and be irritated.
It begins on the platform. We stand in our usual places. We 7.07s see each other most days, there and back (at 18.13). As a commuting man, I have mastered the art of the ultra-faint acknowledgement. To nod at a fellow passenger – let alone say “hi” – marks you out as a rank amateur, a 24-handicapper in the company of scratch players. Various signs are permissible, though. A barely perceptible raising of the eyebrows and a nanosecond of eye contact are the most common.
A 7.29 from Royston I work with says that, after a couple of decades travelling with more or less the same bunch, no one has ever spoken to one another – except once. A man stood up one morning and said: “Look, this is silly. Today, I am going to tell you a story about myself.”
He did. You can only imagine the agony. The philosopher Henri Bergson made the distinction between spatial “clock time” and “lived time”, your individual, conscious sense of the passing of the hours. So a man undergoing torture will have a different sense of time to the man drinking vintage Krug with a scantily clad Liv Tyler. The temps vécu for the victims in the Royston train on that awful day must have been at least 12 hours. Eventually, the man stopped. Everyone went back to his or her paper and laptop. Not another word was spoken.
None of this applies, though, if you belong to a “gaggle”. A gaggle is the most accursed breed of commuters. They know each other: either through work or because at some never-to-be-admitted time in the past they broke their silence – and ranks – and began to speak to one another. There are two, three, four of them. At 7.01am they are on the platform joshing, but joshing in a forced, unfunny, swotty kind of way (note, all first-class passengers are swots). They sit on the train together and chat away. If you are a fellow commuter, I don’t need to say more than that.
Commuting couples aren’t quite so bad. True, the female half will talk unselfconsciously for the entire journey, if permitted. But her partner will glower and frown until even the most garrulous type is forced to subside into the kind of dissatisfied silence inseparable from the hormone oestrogen. The pain the rest of us suffer is mitigated only by the knowledge that the man is suffering 10 times more than we are.
You’ll have gathered that it is the sound of other humans, even more than their physical presence (though that’s bad enough), that most irritates commuting man. And in this paradoxical place, we are also the guilty ones. The laptop maniac winces and huffs at the gaggle comparing notes about the signalling problems at Bletchley. The carriage finally goes quiet and all you hear is maniac’s loud fingers on the keyboard. He types bossily, nastily even, punching the return key like a jab to the face. I would hate to be at the receiving end of whatever laptop man writes. Next to him, a man clears his throat loudly as the couple behind chew the fat about next week’s dinner party. Throat clearer then takes a call from his area manager and we are all plunged into a hellish world of appraisals, diary clashes and HR issues until Camden Town arrives like the promised land.
Commuting man is worse than his female counterpart. Most of the first-class crowd are men. But the rare first-class-commuting woman has her own line in auditory torture. That line is called Boots No 7. For commuting woman, the carriage is a dressing table. I sat next to a lady the other day who spent half the journey touching up her make-up. The pernickety brushings and fidgetings and fussings drove me clinically insane by Berkhamsted. Thereafter, she switched to texting: rapid little clickings and pressings until Mornington Crescent, by which point manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility was all too likely.
The rest of us, who are innocent of laptop abuse, in-carriage beauty regimes and pre-breakfast social intercourse, retreat into our iPods. The hissings and throbbings and tintillations drive everyone else mad.
We disembark in a state of mutual loathing. I get riled by the most innocent things. Like dress sense. I hate the men who wear backpacks with their suits. What kind of person thinks that a dog-eared old Jansport is a fitting accessory for a Boss suit? Fleeces over a shirt and tie? No, no and a thousand times no. You croissant munchers, you coffee slurpers, you bargers-in and tentacled of leg, I curse and detest you all.
After six months in first class, I asked a 7.23 veteran from Baldock the best way to survive these provocations. He said: “Just be nice. Chivalrous. They are not bad people. Every act of kindness will be repaid a dozen times over. So make way for pushy blokes, stand up for fat people, take your phone calls in the vestibule. Your fellow commuters will be forgive you anything. And if not, at least you get to feel insufferably smug and morally superior until the day you retire.”
So there is a point after all.
Mark Jones is a writer and editorial director of a publishing company
