Trains

I was on a train from Sussex to London, my first since lockdown, when I realised I like my commute. The thought worried me a little. What kind of weirdo have I become? A commute is a psychological hurdle, something to be endured, not enjoyed. What’s next? The giddy thrill of waiting in a queue? A root-canal fan club? There are some aspects to commuting I don’t enjoy — the expense of a season ticket, of course, and frustrating delays — but overall, yes, I do like it. And during lockdown I actually missed it. What makes my enjoyment even weirder is that I have no interest in trains.

Not an island Sir: I and those with whom I live and work are all within coughing distance of Sam Leith’s ‘threshold of death’ and we need no reminders that your body is your own, because we wish to God it wasn’t (‘Last rights’, 20 April). But as it is, we owe it to that body to see the process through. My ‘going hence’ is not a private matter. I am not an island but a piece of the continent and that connection is the key to the human genius of social literacy. We demented dodderers are an eighth age, a new demographic, practically a new species, and we bring with us new ethical dilemmas.

‘Virgin trains could be gone from the UK in November,’ blogged Sir Richard Branson from his billionaire hideaway after the Department for Transport barred Stagecoach, Virgin’s 49 per cent joint-venture partner, from bidding for new passenger rail franchises. This followed a row over Stagecoach’s reluctance to help fill a £6 billion black hole in the Railways Pension Scheme – and affects Stagecoach’s bids for the East Midlands and South Eastern franchises as well as the renewal of Virgin’s West Coast Main Line service. Branson is always a sore loser on the rare occasions the dice don’t roll his way, but I doubt many travellers will mourn the passing of his trains.

A month ago I wanted to travel to Bath for a 60th birthday party. From Kent, this either involves a Tube journey to Paddington or traversing the south-western stretch of the M25, where — in the rare moments you are not in stationary traffic — you have the even worse experience of driving over 10,000 misaligned slabs of ribbed concrete. But deep in my hippocampus, I remembered seeing a train to Bath on the departures board at Waterloo. This would let me travel from Seven-oaks to Waterloo East, avoiding the Tube. I looked online, but the website denied all knowledge of such trains. It told me to take the Underground to Paddington and board there. Following a hunch, I searched Waterloo to Bath via Salisbury.

‘How could you forget to get on the train?’ asked the keeper. ‘I can understand how you forgot to get off the train, but how were you standing on the platform waiting for another train to go back the other way, and the train came but you forgot to get on it?’ I had been on my way from Victoria to Clapham Junction. The keeper had rung to say he was popping in to let the dogs out and did I want them fed? I was telling him no thanks, as I would be on the train to Guildford in a few minutes. But as I was sitting in my seat saying this, the train was pulling into Clapham Junction, the doors were opening to let passengers off, and then the train was moving away again.

Every now and then I try to invent a new scientific unit. I’ll never come up with anything as good as the millihelen — a unit of beauty sufficient to launch one ship — or the Sheppey, which is a distance of approximately seven-eighths of a mile defined as ‘the minimum distance at which sheep remain picturesque’. But I do have hopes for the tedion, which measures the half-life of boredom: it denotes the time you must spend in a location to enjoy a 50 per cent chance of overhearing someone say something interesting or funny. On a train to Cardiff or Manchester, a tedion is probably around five to ten minutes. On a Home Counties commuter train it runs into days — or in London, the conversational nadir of the UK, weeks.

Poor Gordon Brown. He embodies the problem traditionally associated with being male, which is that our sex finds it difficult to understand human feelings. Mr Brown recognises, he says in his forthcoming autobiography, that he was not suited to a touchy-feely age. Perhaps it was just as well, because once men, particularly Members of Parliament, start touching and feeling they get into even more trouble, and discover — often too late — that not everyone they touch and feel welcomes it. They are, you might say, groping in the dark. Once upon a time, a high percentage of women understood this defect and usually forgave the opposite sex. But now the quality of mercy is strained by the age of equality. This trend is understandable, but also sad.

Imagine for a moment a parallel universe in which shops had mostly not yet been invented, and that all commerce took place online. This may seem like a fantastical notion, but it more or less describes rural America 100 years ago. In 1919 the catalogues produced by Sears, Roebuck & Company and Montgomery Ward were, for the 52 per cent of Americans who then lived in rural areas, the principal means of buying anything remotely exotic. In that year, Americans spent over $500 million dollars on mail order purchases, half through the two Chicago companies. Yet in 1925, Sears opened its first bricks and mortar shop. By 1929, the pair had opened a further 800. So Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods Market may be history repeating itself.

Q. Having retired, my husband is now an enthusiastic observer of the goldfinches, greenfinches and bullfinches in our garden. Their numbers have increased dramatically since he planted ornamental thistles and teasels, and put out feeders with nyger seed. Our kitchen has French windows which offer a commanding view over the large garden. My problem is that my husband, who has a very keen eye while I do not, keeps spotting some sort of bird activity and urgently requiring me to look at what he is seeing. ‘Look! Just on that shrub in front of you — that thin tree where I’m pointing!’ The instructions are imprecise and I always miss the sighting, which causes him immense frustration. Any suggestions? —W.A., Knutsford, Cheshire A.

Why are men so much more likely to be interested in trains than women? I believe this to be a question of profound importance. It has implications for the debate about whether behavioural gender differences are inborn or learned. And implications for our understanding of male thinking. When at a dinner party did you ever hear an intense conversation between two women about railway timetables? How many teenage girls have you ever noticed among groups of trainspotters? Do small girls ask for a train set as a birthday present? Doesn’t this stark disparity between genders on a matter which touches equally the lives of both, and in which both are equally competent to take an interest, deserve attention? Women use trains just as men do, because they are a convenient means of transport.