I’ve been thinking this morning about the effect of city living on our collective psyche. I’m sat on a crowded train with two bags and a lap top on my lap. Although the train is always half empty when I get on, it never fails to get crowded two stops down the line and 20 mins in to my journey there’s standing-room only.
A man sat next to me about 20 minutes ago. There’s not quite enough room in the double seat for both of us. Our arms are touching. I’m squashed. He read his magazine for a while and then dozed off. He’s now snoring. In a few minutes his head may drop on my shoulder. This is pretty intimate. Yet he hasn’t looked at me at all, or wished me good morning or done anything at all to acknowledge that I even exist. This is of course, completely normal. But it’s also – well – rude!
As it was clearly the jeep’s fault, I wound down my window and called out to the car driver that we’d seen what had happened. “We’re in a real hurry though. We’ve got to go.” I hastily scrawled our number on an old cassette card (I know, I know) lying in the door pocket, thrust it through the window at him and off we sped.
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