Some People I Slept With

Commuters come and commuters go …
When you've been long-distance commuting for as many millennia as I have, eventually the day will come when the ever-dwindling complement of fellow-travellers who were there on your first day trickles away to nothing and leaves you alone … the sole survivor.

That day was today.

With the depressing inevitability of erosion - and yesterday's retirement of John (aka Wiggy for his ludicrously laughable baldy-rug) Old Dive has become the longest-serving commuter on my train.
Don't ask how many years … some of you might not have been born when I started.

The old familiar faces have gradually disappeared and a good many of them I actually miss in a strange and slightly disturbing way.

Here - for no reason other than wallowing in my own nostalgia, and disregarding such occasional and erotic delights as the Thumb-Sucking Girl and the Church Of Fornication - are teensy vignettes of just a few of the people I have slept, snored and drooled with over the years during my three-and-a-half hour journey to work and the three-and-a-half hour journey home again and who have since fallen by the wayside:

- Mary Hopkin, Witchfinder General (for an expalanation of which, please see the Thumb-Sucking post).

- A Woman Called Horse.
A starchy lady of indeterminate age whose grip on reality had slipped to such an extent that she habitually travelled to London dressed for horseriding (boots, jodphurs, riding jacket - the full monty - and read nothing but horse magazines.
She had a short, loud bark of a laugh that could alarm those who didn't know her.

- Underbite and Backspace.
A matching pair of imbecilic sports fans from Ipswich; Underbite because you could have used his lower jaw as a shelf for your coffee mug, and Backspace for the sheer, blank stupidity of his expression, as if God had accidentally hit "backspace" when it came time to insert his brain.

- The Ginger Pig.
A fat, florid and unfeasibly ginger-coiffed man in his sixties who snored quite entertainingly; named after a John LeCarré character.

- Stinky Perfume Girl.
Those of you who know I am anosmic will also know that all an anosmic can register of a perfume is the taste of the solvent in the air. All perfumes "smell" (taste) just like paint, turps and petrol.
Stinky Perfume Girl (after the … ahem … Madonna song of not quite the same name) used to board my train at Stowmarket and I had to hope she sat at least half a dozen seats away from me. If she came any closer I had to endure several minutes of coughing and retching into my hanky before the reeking, fœtid cloud of stench she carried around with her subsided sufficiently to allow safe inhalation.

- Breakfast Boy.
This guy was a small, bearded, gnome-like apparition who for many a year sat at one of the table seats and would entertain the rest of us daily by fussily arranging a veritable smørgasbørd of Tupperware on the table before him, after which he would painstakingly prepare his breakfast, producing cereal, milk, fruit, toast, butter and marmalade from various containers and serving them up in matching Tupperware bowls.
He would pour his coffee from a flask into yet another plastic container, add his sugar from another and then unroll a napkin to display his array of cutlery.
After all that, watching him eat was always a bit of a letdown.
The whole lot would be carefully packed away at the end of his repast; he probably got his secretary to do his washing up when he reached his office.

- Mrs. Stiff.
That's her real name and she did her best to live up to it.
And she managed it heroically while she was awake, sat ramrod-straight and staring unblinkingly at the back of the head of the person in front.
After an hour or so, however, her concentration would inevitably slip, her eyes would close and she would do a passable impersonation of a calving glacier, a slow-motion collapse of her massive bulk, sufficient to start a tsunami were it to happen at sea.
She would end up in a melted heap, mouth agape and drooling horribly, snorting and snuffling and twitching in an amusingly diverting manner.
One just had to hope when the inevitable collapse happened that she would fall away from you and not onto your lap. I've had to wake her innumerable times when several hundredweight of avoirdupois has oozed across the armrest and threatened me with broken ribs and worse.
She was also quite dreadfully warm and clammy to the touch. Icky.

- Monkey Boy.
One of the longest-surviving commuters who only dropped off the grid last Christmas, Monkey Boy was a nice enough chap but was cursed with a head that sat directly upon his torso without any sign of an intervening neck, and he walked with a bow-legged gait and his arms held out to his sides, just like an orang-utan or George W. Bush.
One had to fight the urge to offer him a banana.

There have been many more but I really can't be arsed to dredge them all up; perhaps another time …

Sadly, the modern-day replacements for my old commuting companions are a sorry lot, but I can reassure myself in the knowledge that no more than five percent of them will still be there eighteen months down the line.
Eighteen months seems to be the cut-off point where suicidal despair, physical and mental breakdown or death weed out the true, long-distance commuter from the mere dilettante.
Most of the rest give up between two and five years after starting.
Only true heroes for whom Hell holds no horror have the fortitude, the lazy-assed laissez-faire and the quite breathtaking reserves of patience necessary to become a "lifer".

Lately I have been regularly entertained by a "newbie" on the homeward leg of my journey.
He has yet to be given a name as he's only been there for six months or so, but perhaps you can come up with some suggestions and we'll see if he deserves any of them.

This guy is someone I found sitting in "my" seat one evening at the end of last summer, a big, florid-faced guy in his forties with a quite startling collection of chins that appeared to have spread well beyond the confines of his face and neck.
I smiled and nodded at him and sat in the seat in front.
Just to clarify the "my" seat thing: I like to sit in the middle seat of the carriage facing north on the east side of the train for my return journey … It means I don't get the sun in my eyes and there's a partition directly behind me, not some bastard sitting there, drumming their fingers on my seat or resting their newspaper on the back of my head while I try to sleep.

Anyhoo; the very next day "my" seat is empty and I sit in it, only to find this guy running up the aisle, red-faced and panting and looking on the verge of a massive coronary, asking me politely if I would move as I am sitting in "his" seat.
A conversation ensued, starting somewhat tense and prickly but getting friendly pretty quickly, where the situation was explained to him and it was agreed that he was welcome to the seat on the days I worked from home but if he wanted it any other time he would have to get to it first.

Not many days after that I was walking to my carriage only to see someone running full pelt up the far side of the platform, glancing back at me and trying - amusingly - to hide behind pillars and other people.
Lo and behold, it was our man, desperately and more than a little childishly trying to reach the seat before me.

I continued strolling right past him as he stood, panting alarmingly and stuck fast in the scrummage for the door and got on at the far end of the carriage (where the queue is always much shorter).
When he at last managed to board the train and found me in the seat he made one of those cartoon facial expressions … his jaw hit the floor and his eyes popped out on stalks.
"How did you …?" he gasped, pointing back down the platform in utter confusion.
Hee hee hee, said Old Dive.

And so it has gone on. I manage to beat him nine times out of ten. I may be older but I am fitter and steeped in the ancient and arcane tao of commuting.

Unfortunately I don't think he'll last much longer. I can see him collapsing with a heart attack one of these afternoons, which would be a shame as beating him to "my" seat certainly keeps me fit, and - in my own immature fashion - greatly amused.

One day I too will fall by the wayside, probably suffering a massive coronary as I run up that pesky final escalator after my regular afternoon five mile jog across London from my office in Westminster to the station.
Until that day - and from today onwards - I shall revel in the slightly dubious honour of being the longest-serving "lifer" in my own personal commuter Hell.