SIR - No sooner had I boarded the 06:55 from Norwich this morning and set down to write another -feculent corpulent exciting episode of my ongoing SF bonkbuster (266,000 words and counting) than I was completely surrounded by a gaggle of about eight well-dressed women of various ages, who talked at one another for the whole journey to London, loudly, and without stopping – for more than two hours. Their remorseless chat was suffused with a cloud of chokingly intense semtex powder female grooming gunk.
I responded by writing more than 1800 words of quite nauseatingly graphic brutality.
To divert accusations of sexism, my journey is occasionally enlivened disrupted by blokey types (presumably estate agents used car salesmen human resources managers) in sharp suits and too much cologne, braying into cellphones.
Then there was the time when, seated at a table on a train to Norwich, I had to witness the couple opposite me (one of each gender) shoving their tongues down each other’s throats. Frankly, watching hot slug-on-slug action in one of David Attenborough’s documentaries was more titillating. Thankfully the couple got off the train at Ipswich, which seemed somehow appropriate. However, my attempt at writing a perfectly judged couple-of-dozen pages or so of explicit sex foundered, as I’d quite gone flaccid off the boil.
One of the first acts of the new London Mayor, Boris Johnson, whom history will show to have been the finest statesman of this or any other century, was to enact a ban on the consumption of alcohol on all public transport in the capital. I think that this should be accompanied by a ban on talking, overt sexual display and smelly grooming products on all transport whatsoever, nationwide, without exception.
Tomorrow is National Work-From-Home Day. I shall be working from home, as I usually do on a Thursday (ironically, that’s the day when Mrs Gee, nominally a home-worker, endures commuting hell).
When the management of companies in general wakes up from the myth of ‘presenteeism’ and realizes that commuting has progressed from the era of bowler-hatted men getting the 8:08 from Woking to Waterloo, and that the internet renders much commuting as archaic as carbon paper, correction fluid and the letters page of the Daily Telegraph, perhaps more people will be able to work from home, where they will be more productive and will not be forced to endure the prolonged proximity of their fellow human beings?
Yours faithfully,
Disgusted of Cromer.
PS: I plan to ask Mrs Christmas for a set of noise-cancelling headphones. And a gasmask. If I can survive that long.
You should cycle instead.
Eh? Oh. Never mind.
You mean you don’t like being surrounded by women?
On first reading, I thought the strikethrough in the third paragraph referred to ‘used-ear salesmen’. I suppose selling on your ears is one solution for a quiet journey.
It also makes a lot more sense than a used oar salesman.
You mean you don’t like being surrounded by women?
I love women. I adore women. I worship women. What I don’t like, though, is the invasion of personal space with incessant, disruptive and above all inconsiderate noise.
An Anonymous Well-Wisher sends this article on the potential benefits of earwigging on trains.
I cycled to work today. A pleasant ride along rthe Banks of the Bridgwater canal with the whoosh of trams going past on the other side. A bit noisy under the M60 but very pleasant and green. The only twittering is from birds.
Centre of Manchester is full of blue scotsment so is best missed today. No its not Mel Gibson but Rangers are playing Zenit St. Petersburg in the UEFA cup and the cetre of town and railway stations are best avoided today.
Brian an Bob – you could cycle from Cromer to London… but it would take a very long time and you wouldn’t be able to write on the way.
Indeed Brian, my beloved Glasgow Rangers have a rather important game tonight at Old Trafford.
Was speaking to a friend/colleague at Manchester Uni. this morning who is leaving work early today to avoid the masses. For example, I wasn’t aware of the likes of this until today.
Brian – I thought Mel Gibson was a blue
antisemiteAustralian, not a Scotsman? But, I guess, if you’ve listened to AC/DC as long as I have it’s hard to tell the difference. And one of them’s a Geordie.Firstly, with enough practice, one can write whilst cycling. That said, I wouldn’t advise it in Manchester – what with avoiding taxi drivers and cursing idiot cyclists who cycle through red lights/whilst on the phone/very, very slowly I barely have time to jot down a shopping list on my daily cycle commute.
If you like AC/DC Dr Gee I think you might enjoy one of my forthcoming collaborations. I can’t reveal the song title but 13 AMPS is our trading name for this one. Hard part for me is to do a
BorisBrian Johnson impersonation so tight trousers are necessitated me thinks.Brian Johnson impersonation so tight trousers are necessitated me thinks
Only if the bowler’s holding the batsman’s willy. Oh? Sorry, that’s Brian Johnston, I think. No, I think gargling with broken glass mixed in with superfluid helium would probably be more effective.
@Henry – Mel Gibson hails from USA and his political views reflect a Catholic Irish American upbringing. I was refering to his attempts at a Scottish accent and woad fetish in Braveheart.
@Graham At last a football team that makes rangers look liberal.
@Bea. The main problem with writing while cycling in Manchester is the vibration from the cobbles.
I was refering to his attempts at a Scottish accent and woad fetish in Braveheart.
I enjoyed Braveheart, but since then, I wouldn’t let him across the threshold. No through woad.
Henry, I think noise-canceling headphones only eliminate regular droning background noises such as train and plane noise.
Really? Well, I guess there’s no option but Deep Purple on my i-player thingy.
Be careful with those headphones Henry. From the CBC:
“Friends said that Otieno, 23, a student at the College of the Rockies, was out for a walk and likely wearing stereo earbuds, so he might not have heard the falling helicopter.”
Yes, you read that right – a helicopter landed on some poor student out for a walk with headphones on.
I don’t write while cycling to work, but I have some of my best ideas while pedalling. Seriously.
I agree with the serious cycling; the problem with frivolous cycling is that no matter how good the idea, there is always the chance of ending up under a bus.
I had a student once who was run over by a truck while cycling. Well to be exact he had probabply stopped cycling when the wheel went over him. He survived pretty much unharmed and the Doctors in A&E (yes another Britishism to those on the other side of the pond) would not believe his story until they found the tread marks on his jeans. it is amazing how strong the human pelvis is.
Mel Gibson is Australian. Mad Max, say no more (that was my policy when the movie came out in the 1980s and it seemed to me at the time that everyone I knew thought that applying the name to someone they knew who shared the first three letters of their name would be frightfully witty). In Mad Max, Mel et al. have Australian accents. It was a successful movie on the global stage, so Mad Max 2 is dubbed into American. Then Mel learned the lingo, having relocated (for the $$$$). As for his Scottish accent, can’t say, having lost interest in his charms by then and in light of comments about historical inaccuracy, did not see the film (it was the face paint, guv).
On the travelling, all the things you say, Henry, plus those announcements from hell. Do you get those on the Norfolk line? We get a constant stream of very loud, computerised drivel about beggars, not leaving your litter, you must buy a ticket, mind the cold, mind the wet, mind the leaves, not to mention the litany of all the stations every 30 seconds (my route is a loop that starts and ends at Waterloo, so nobody is on that train unless they go on it regularly. No stray lost tourists. All completely unncessary). Sometimes, the guard repeats them all with a human voice, so we get it all twice. Scream and double scream. Add that to the Hell that is Kings Cross station post- international Eurostar terminus (everyone and his dog, granny, 15 children and suitcases trying to get on one Victoria line escalator) — well, it is enough to make one join the Disgusted of Comer society.
Noise reduction headphones: I bought a pair for the MP a few Christmasses ago for his flights — says they are very good indeed, and has taken to wearing them on the train. But they are rather large. This network is not for advertising products but anyone is welcome to send me an email for the details. (Because of the large size of the noise reduction headphones, the MP has recently taken to listening to Mozart on his MP3 player instead. But I just want silence.)
Don’t forget to panic buy carrots tomorrow, Henry. You can even do that from home!
That’s a hoot Scott – LOL
@Scott – carrots. Right. I’ll add them to my list. Are you still a chicken, by the way?
@Maxine – the Bittern line, between Sheringham and Norwich, is lovely. Almost always runs bang on time, and the rare announcements are in soft Norfolk accents, on the rare occasions that they are audible. Bootiful. The main Norwich-London line has all-human announcements, but these are mostly of the variety that if you’re on the train but haven’t bought the right ticket, which is only available every second Wednesday in Lent (in the town hall, if wet) from selected outlets in Caithness, and which can only be used on trains between 3 am and 6 am, anticlockwise, if the cusp of Lupicale is in Trine (if a SupaSaver) or if you rotate your grandmother inside a pentagram drawn in the blood of a seventh son of a seventh son murdered under Aries with a blunt baculum of a decerebrated walrus (if a MegaSaver), then you have to run in front of the train licking the rails clean.
… and yes please, do tell me about the MP’s supersized earmuff things.
Bose to you, Henry.
Human announcements are bearable so long as not interspersed, interstitial-fashion, with pungent computer drones of the same info together with injunctions to buy tickets, not provide handouts to beggars etc.
The Norfolk lines sound positively idyllic, actually.
It’s not the regular announcements that drive me mad so much as the constantly repeated apologies if anything goes wrong such that the train will be delayed. I once asked a train conductor about this. She said that it was in the rules – they had to repeat these apologies every ten to fifteen minutes or so, even if the train was between stations and everyone aboard will have heard them already.
Why did my fingers type “pungent” to describe “computer drones” I wonder? Perhaps they meant to type “repugnant” or “resonant”? I know my brain isn’t up to much but it sometimes surprises me what I’ve typed without realising.
Yep, I think they have to repeat all this stuff, as well as having it on a dot-matrix display loop, because of some EU accessibility rules that came into law on 1 January one year— it all started very suddenly.
I thought ‘pungent’ was right the first time.
Well, they may be annoying but they aren’t smelly. Are they?
I once took a very early Sunday morning train from Glasgow to York. There was hardly anyone on board between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the staff must have been bored because we started to get announcements like “the buffet cart is now leaving carriage A”, closely followed by “the buffet cart is now entering carriage B”. All the way down the train and halfway back again before we got to Waverley. Thankfully more people got on and the staff managed to find better things to do on the way down the coast.
Well, they may be annoying but they aren’t smelly. Are they?
Probably not, but the juxtaposition of ‘pungent’ and ‘computer drones’ seemed agreeably surreal.