THE DAILY COMMUTE

I’m quite lucky really compared to most in the sense that I walk to work in the mornings, a brisk 15 minute walk and I’m in the office. However I still on the occasion have to use public transport to visit clients and attend meetings. Today, I’m off to Bristol for the day where my head office is. So leaving my house at 7 on route to Paddington I start to think about all the people that have to do a commute like this every day.

So an hour later I’m on my train at Paddington waiting for it to depart, WAITING...... realistically a lot of time on the daily commute is spent waiting. Waiting for your bus or train to come, waiting for the next stop to be yours, waiting in traffic.... waiting. And if you’re on public transport, waiting for your stop, it is unusually quite. Apart from the surrounding environment, the sound of traffic, or the hustle of footsteps, no one really talks; the sound of people’s voices is rare... I find this unusual silence most noticeable on the trains, it is so surreal... think about it, apart from the loud sound of the trains motion gushing through the tunnels, trains are so quite, considering the amount of people in such a confined place.


Looking around everyone is in their own little world, whether it be reading a newspaper or a book, listening to their iPods, playing games on their phones or doing work on their laptops. And for the people, like me, that haven’t got one of these aids to pass their time on the commute; well then you look around reading the adverts, or anything really, the back of someone’s newspaper, the priority seat sign over and over, or people. I like reading people, looking at their face expressions, wondering what the imaginary world the book they are reading has pulled them into. Wondering what life this person leads, what language they speak, what accent they have. All this wondering brings up questions that I will never gain the answers to, as I will most likely never speak to them.

Do you think there will ever be a day when you can get on a form of public transport, greet the people who also share this common daily commute, have a discussion to pass time on your journey, and then say your goodbyes when it is your stop?.... I know on the rare occasion you may speak to someone sitting next to you or waiting at the bus stop... but these conversations normally commence from some sort of moan, ‘the bus is taking so long’, ‘it is so hot on this tube’ .... But will it ever be a common subject or interest ‘did you see Eastenders last night’ or ‘what job do you do’.... An unlinked, form of conversation with a person you may never see again, but is nice to know for those brief 10mins or 8 stops that you commonly share.

Let’s face it, you know and I know this will never be the norm, talking to a complete stranger just to pass the time on our daily commute, with no hidden agenda. People are too busy to care, busy even though they are waiting; with nowhere to go until it is their stop- but yet too busy to have the desire for general chit chat with a complete stranger.

I wrote the above post on the way to Bristol, but on the way home the weirdest thing happened, I had a general conversation with the person sitting next to me which lasted about 30minutes. I do not know if it was a subconscious effort on my part after writing the above post several hours earlier, but what I do know was that it was nice to break the unsociable norm of the daily commute, and it certainly did make the last 30 minutes of my journey pass by incredibly fast.
Also a few days later, I was on my way back from another client meeting at West end, and there was a delay on the DLR train at Bank; then the lady sitting next to me started talking to me. Admittedly the conversation started as she asked me about the delay. But for the next 20 minutes or so it was pure general chit chat, with a genuine goodbye when my stop came before hers. And do you know what it feels good to have broken the unsociable silence on these two occasions.