Training | 2009.08.30
A little more conversation | David McKie
The end of the London Paper leaves us free to chat on the tube. Just don\'t get carried away
A few, but probably not very many, London commuters will be left with a grievous gap in their lives with the disappearance next month of Rupert Murdoch\'s London Paper , rival in the capital to the Evening Standard (paid for) and the two remaining freesheets, the London Lite and the myriad copies of the nationwide Metro left over from the morning rush hour.
I can find no reliable analysis showing what people do to while away time on commuter trains; no doubt in some university an aspiring PhD is working on one. My purely impressionistic figures would suggest that some 17% of evening commuters travelling out of London read one of the evening free sheets, of whom 67.3% have accepted copies thrust into their hands by newspaper chuggers, while 32.7% have become so bored with looking out of the window or eyeing their fellow travellers by the time they have reached Streatham Common that they\'ve snatched up the copies others discarded. They will now read London Lite or the London Paper for approximately 13 minutes or, if not interested in celebrities, 25 seconds. After that they may try the Sudoku.
A more rewarding course is to trawl the carriage for copies of paid-for newspapers left behind by departing passengers. These tend to be few, but if you are lucky you may come across the Daily Telegraph sport supplement, where you can read Geoffrey Boycott deploring the standard of present day English batting.
There are plenty of even more fruitful ways of using one\'s time on these daily involuntary journeys. A small but still excessive proportion are yabbering away on their mobile phones, and no longer confining to themselves the mating cry of mobile phonesters of earlier days: "Darling, I\'m on the train." You may even be able to learn just what it was that Sandra so fatally said to Joanna. It could even give you an idea for a novel.
More rewarding still, and practised on some of the trains I use by a heartening 28.973% of all passengers, is the reading of books. Many of these will be books you have seen in a 3 for 2 offer at Waterstone\'s, but some of those who seem most deeply involved in what they read, even to the point of missing their stop, have more demanding or more exotic tastes. Around 0.65% will be reading the Bible or something similar. Herodotus had a bit of a vogue after The English Patient, though I can\'t say I have seen anyone reading Caesar or Tacitus for quite some time.
One growing trend in our national life is to try to make friends with strangers. There is, for instance, a wheeze in Regent\'s Park , London this afternoon where anyone who turns up will be invited to make conversation with people they have never previously met, with a menu of 25 discussion topics to choose from. Life-long friendships and even marriages, not to mention countless affairs, are said to have started with chance conversations on trains. But be wary. The person who strikes up a chat may be a) an unfailing source of wit, erudition and wisdom whose homely truths will stay with you for the rest of your life, but may equally be b) an impossible bore or c) someone who has something – it may be a product, it may be a creed or philosophy – to sell.
Always have an escape route to hand. One sometimes sees on a morning train a teacher marking up test papers which would have been dealt with the previous night had Joe or Steph not texted and suggested the pub. It\'s easy to build up a comparable file of apparently significant papers to bury your head in if your neighbour\'s chatter begins to grate. Best to see they are headed with some deterrent title like The International Institute of Advanced Ratiocination. Few whom you meet on commuter trains will know that it does not exist.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]underground-commuter-newspaper
