Commuting days until retirement: 513

We commuters have our darker evenings, when everything goes wrong (why always evenings, when we’re on the way home, and not when we’re headed to work?) but there seem to have been remarkably few of those for a while. Until today.

Well, it wasn’t that bad – only an hour’s worth of delay. Seeing that my usual fast train was going to be very late I had made a snap decision and got on the non-delayed slow one. Mistake. We ended up stuck interminably in a station half-way, while everything, including the slow/fast one, overtook us.

But of course if you’re a reader there’s an up side to this. And I now have on my Kindle the Will Storr that I mentioned last Sunday, and was attempting to read that. I say attempting to – a couple of seats from me was a bishop, purple and splendid, and having a magisterial speaking voice to go with it. Clearly he was used to projecting his words around cathedrals, and so our railway carriage had very little chance. He was talking to his wife, who sat opposite him. I hadn’t really thought about it, but the decibels must be an occupational hazard if you’re the wife of a bishop. (Or the husband of a bishop, if we ever have any of those.) The subject matter, on the other hand, was not at all episcopal, but quite mundane, even though rendered beautifully and sonorously – perfect, in fact, for undermining the concentration.

And so that is how my exploration of why we believe what we believe was disrupted by a booming bishop.