Sunday 23rd December 2007

I travelled home from Oxford today on surprisingly quiet trains. I had expected the Sunday before Christmas to be a transport marathon, but the train from Oxford to Birmingham was almost empty and the connection to Stafford was only half-full.

I sat down at a table opposite a woman who was reading. I am very paranoid on trains, and so even though it was half an hour until we’d be arriving in Stafford, I didn’t get out a book or anything just in case the train stopped so briefly and with sufficiently little warning that I wouldn’t have time to return it to my bag. Also, I was reading Through Gates of Fire by journalist Martin Bell and was getting a bit sick of its hyperbolic vitriol which, though in the just cause of human rights and the end of all wars, is a bit wearing to read in large chunks.

I didn’t want to waste my half hour, though, so I started practising the piano on the table. I’m not very good, and the repertoire one can usefully do without music or, indeed, a piano is self-limiting, so I confined myself to gently tapping out the fingering for C major on the tabletop. I rather lost myself in this exercise until an indeterminate amount of time later I looked up and saw the reading woman looking at me as though I was mental. I looked back, trying to communicate the fact that I’m not a weirdo and was just making use of this time to get a bit of piano practice, which I’m not going to be able to do over Christmas in my piano-free house, using only my eyes. My desperate and obviously doomed attempt to communicate this complicated message through the medium of my eyes probably did precisely the opposite.

Shortly afterwards, an unshaven bloke in a long, tatty coat on a seat opposite leaned over and started talking to her. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with unprovoked conversations on public transport—in fact, I’m more likely to start one than most. However, if you’re a slightly trampish-looking gentleman, it pays to always remember that striking up a chat with a lone woman will probably worry her.

First, he asked her when the train was due to arrive in Manchester. She barely looked away from her book and confirmed that it would make it in at just past sixteen o’clock (she called it ‘four’, but she’s probably isn’t part of my twenty-four hour clock campaign). A few minutes later, he started telling her that he was from London, and how much he was therefore enjoying the countryside we were winding our way through. She made almost no eye contact, trying to find that delicate balance between being not encouraging further communication and responding just enough not to provoke any adverse reaction.

It seemed a bit sad, because unshaven-o probably wasn’t much of a threat. In fact, he might genuinely have been over-awed by the rolling fields, slightly grim and muddy as they were, and have just felt the need to communicate it to another human being. However, it was hard not to feel a bit sympathetic for the poor woman who was having to deal with this stranger intruding on her enjoying her novel with his slightly scary spontaneous commentary.

Riddled with assumptions about her perception of the situation, I immediately wondered if there was a way I could save her from it. I had also assumed from her knowing when the train was due to get in to Manchester Piccadilly that she was probably bound for the end of the line. Since I was getting off significantly sooner, I thought that I could say ‘Come on, then, Mum, we’re almost at Stafford now,’ and thus allow her to follow me ‘off’ the train, whilst in fact sneaking into the next carriage and away from the nutter. However, with no way to communicate this cunning plan to its intended benefactor, I reasoned that she’d probably think I was a nutter. Which, in many ways, thinking about addressing a stranger with a title usually reserved for a specific member of one’s immediate family with no obvious explanation, I probably was.

Then, with all these thoughts that I might be the crazy one, I remembered that the woman already thought I was crazy. I was the nut-job playing the phantom piano. The poor woman was now doubly poor, surrounded on all sides by train crazies.

As we approached Stafford, I put my huge rucksack on my back and, moments later, she got her things together and made for the train door. I went to the opposite end of the carriage in the end (it was actually slightly further from where we were sitting, but there were fewer members of the train-going public blocking up the aisle in my chosen direction) and so I never found out whether she had actually got off in Stafford, or effected my plan without my help and used the occurrence of a stop as an excuse to leave the Head Cases’ Carriage (it’s a bit like the Quiet Coach).

It is nice to be back in the sleepy countryside for Christmas. On the bus home from the station, I saw an A-board proclaiming that the Staffordshire Newsletter’s main headline was ‘MERRY XMAS TO ALL OUR READERS’. I thought for a moment that it would be entertaining if this was the most important thing happening in Staffordshire at the moment, a true self-referential case of the media making the news, and this was indeed their lead story. Then, thinking for another moment, I had the reassuring realisation that, here in the middle of nowhere, it was probably all those things.

 

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