My fellow train commuters, please allow me to apologise. It would appear that I have sinned, yet again. This time I have committed the grave offence of manually closing the automatic internal rail carriage door in order to preserve at least a portion of City Rail’s generous supply of air-conditioning. At least, the door was labelled as ‘automatic’ – but that might have been some subtle ruse to confuse the Forces of Evil.
Had it not been for the timely intervention of a fellow traveller, I would not have realised that I had transgressed yet another of the Unwritten Laws of Commuting. Indeed, his resonant quizative assertion of “are you f*ckin’ stoopid or somefink?” was all that prevented me from returning home, after a long day of employment servitude, completely in ignorance of my crime.
I certainly was not fooled by the appearance or manner of my informant. Being stubbly unshaven in the recently publicised month of ‘Mo-vember’ – to raise awareness of men’s health issues – is surely to be considered as a Badge of Honour.
And the reek of alcohol could have come from any number of sources apart from the crumpled paper bag containing a brown, long-necked bottle. On reflection, I suspect that the gentleman was in fact returning from a convention of quantum physicists, and the rumpledness was merely the result of being confined to some philanthropic Think Tank for a prolonged period.
As to the question of my stupidity, I am not keen to venture an opinion with regard to comparison of such august company. Clearly I am not in the same intellectual league as my incidental travelling companion, although to be fair neither of us had ready access to an appropriate assessment instrument at that time and place, let alone any means of independent judgement.
But I have digressed, in addition to transgressed. Again. I once was thoughtless enough to prop an elbow onto an armrest, never suspecting that five minutes later the adjacent passenger would require the use of the same facility.
In a moment of wild abandon in a now bygone time, I took a thoughtfully folded broadsheet newspaper onto the train with me. Unfortunately though, I found myself eventually needing to open to a new page. Regardless of the care taken to minimise the amount of space required for this seemingly mundane task, it clearly drew the ire of many of the jet-setting globetrotters temporarily in transit between Harris Park and Lidcome.
And here’s a quick tip for any other middle aged women with a single piercing in each ear. Don’t engage in eye contact with those who flaunt multiple exhibits of face hardware, unless you’re skilled in that dazzling repartee of the type popular in the emerging genre of Street Lit. I’ve never quite understood why these young adults would go to the trouble, pain and expense of looking like a cluster bomb victim, given that they object to a related species observing them.
But be assured, I have learned my lessons well. I did attempt to make notes on the other subtle nuances of commuting, but apparently the scratching of a pen on paper was interfering with the Personal Listening Devices from three rows down. The Personal Listeners quite reasonably needed to increase the volume even further than was normally required to drown out the audial obstructions caused by twenty other passengers, simultaneously telling their mobile phone callers that they were on the train.
A book titled in the vein of The Lore of the City Commuter would be a fine vessel for documenting the lessons from my past sojournal wickedness, for the edification of future travellers. However, it would seem wise not to attempt to write any part of it on the 7.55 Interurban from my local railway station.
Elizabeth Kostova’s fine work (Time Warner, 704 pages) was a surprise in many ways, not least of all for the accolades implied in the descriptions and coverage of the services provided by libraries, and how effective and efficient librarians are.
