Going commuter crazy - a rant

As a recent graduate and newbie nine to fiver, commuting is a new entry in my top ten things to complain about. In fact, it is awarded the top spot, going straight in at number one. Until some eminent scientists somewhere figure out a way of teleporting me to work, and until I snag a multi-million pound city-style bonus and bag a chauffeur (both about as likely as each other) I must stick to public transport methods of trekking across London.

My bed is in East London and my desk is in the West; so I must make my daily pilgrimage and do so with as much patience and piety as I can muster. Both are difficult to find within one’s soul at 8am on a windy Wednesday, when all District line trains are cancelled and there are no seats left on the bus (a bus that may not even be headed in the right direction as far as you can tell.) There are many tests of faith along the way. A 7.52 train which may as well be renamed the 7.56; the cityworker and his crappy earphones that are leaking the tinny tune of his dubious music choice throughout the carriage; the two old women squawking in your ear about the state of the nation (all this fuss about the environment is a storm in a teacup, apparently) ; the bobble-hatted man who curtly asks you to move down the train and then almost knocks you over before you can pick up your handbag; not to mention the stifling heat that envelops you in its artificial warmth and makes you want to rip off your cashmere sweater and throw it out of the window onto the tracks, regardless of how many weeks of torture you had to endure to pay for it.

All of these trials and tribulations are there to try your patience: but the test is not whether you get internally agitated – that is a given, and even complaining is a required activity. The real benchmark is whether you can hold in all that aggression and remain remarkably restrained and collected, in that beautiful, essentially British way. Commuting is a test of endurance – forget half an hour on the treadmill pretending not to be out of breath in front of all those toned and honed gym bunnies; the real stamina test is whether you can keep yourself from hitting the lady who sits on your coat and won’t budge, or the guy who leaps on to the train at the last moment, jams the doors and leaves delayed devastation in his wake. If you flip, you’re the crazy lady who can’t cope. If you smirk, you’re just plain crazy. The only thing you can do is keep it all inside, stick your nose in your book, and giggle, writhe, seethe and laugh, completely unknown to your fellow rat-racers.

There’s one up side to the nightmare journey of course; compared to those waking horrors, when you finally get to work, bum on seat, eyes to the screen – by comparison it’ll all seem like a dream.