Commuting days until retirement: 230

Among what would probably nowadays be called the commuting community − if it weren’t so hard to say, that is − things have changed over the years. In my previous incarnation as a commuter, before I spent a period working from home (something like 20 years ago) the range of train-bound activities was different. Most newspaper readers struggled with big broadsheets, trying vainly to avoid irritating their neighbours by obscuring their vision or tickling their ears as they turned the pages. Now they will either skim through a free tabloid (for London commuters like me there’s the Metro in the morning or the Standard on the way home) or skip nimbly through the contents of a morning daily on their tablet. If any were using mobile phones they could only at that time have been either texting or talking on them. The rumbling of the train was punctuated by the raucous piping of that horrible Nokia tune, or some other crude electronic noise. Reading on my journey now, I’m often startled by a sudden explosion of pop music, a brass band, a morning chorus of twittering birds or a concussion of breaking glass. It takes a few moments of perplexity before you come to and realise it’s just another ring tone.

Laptop computers in those earlier times were still sufficiently rare that one man I worked with avoided using one on the train because he was afraid everyone would think he was showing off. In the intervening years they multiplied rapidly for a while, only to have their entertainment functions largely replaced by tablets and smartphones. Of course there are still the laptop diehards, mostly using the train as an extension of the office. A discreet glimpse over one of their shoulders usually shows them to be working on a financial spreadsheet, or bent over some programming code. Such dedication! It may not save me from being a dull boy, but I do take care to keep my commuting time free of work − of that sort of work, anyway.

Many of course just lose themselves in music on their noise-cancelling headphones. There’s one man on my train every day, in both directions, whom I have never actually seen without a large pair of headphones on − and that includes his walk to and from the station. I often wonder whether they have been surgically implanted. And a whole new range of activities has sprung up that were not possible formerly, the most popular of all being just to play with your smartphone. That’s what I’m doing now, in writing this, if it counts as playing, which it probably does. From where I’m sitting now, on the morning train, just at my end of the carriage I can count four Metros, one Kindle, one book, one laptop, two phone-fiddlers (including me) and one handheld game console, right next to me. The iPads seem unusually rare today − although I have just spotted one up the other end of the carriage. That leaves two deep in conversation, one asleep, and two looking out of the window − earnest students of misty early morning fields, grazing cows, builders yards and back gardens ranging from the fanatically neat to the chaotically neglected.

And so the rows of heads comprising this very twenty-first century aggregation of social chit-chat, dreams, electronic jitterbugging and imaginary digital worlds sway in synchrony with the jolting of the train as it rattles towards the capital. In the meantime I am realising that this piece, intended as an introduction to a review of some of my recent fiction reading on the train, has outgrown its purpose and will have to be a post on its own. The reviewing will be coming next.