Brain Training

As I now spend a great deal of my time on trains - in the last month I've been down to London twice, down to Sittingbourne for the weekend and to Glasgow three times (an hour each way on the train) - I experiment with different ways of amusing myself. It's at least four and a half hours each way to London; the first three hours tend to zip by OK, whilst the final hour and a half tends to drag. You're tired; your legs are cramping up through inaction; your shoulder (in my case) is getting stiff because you can't sit up straight; you've exhausted Grazia, with its weekly proclamations that Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are about to split up, that Brangelina have been having more furious rows and are about to split up and that Jennifer Aniston is on the point of nervous collapse because she still hasn't found a new husband and had a baby. After about four years of reporting these three stories on an endless weekly loop, not one of them has yet come to pass, but still Grazia continues to present them as 'fact' and we continue to flick through each week thinking 'Ooh, what's happened THIS time?'

Once I've finished flicking through my mag, I've got the choice of catching up on the various blogs I read - depending on whether I can face doing battle with the intermittent wi-fi or not; and whether I've managed to snaffle one of the office iPads for my trip. Yes, having been a proud Luddite for most of my adult life - the last thing I really wanted was an iPod Nano, which is now languishing in a drawer somewhere - I am definitely lusting after an iPad. You can (nearly) touch type on them (I'm doing it now, veracity fans!) and they are pleasingly shiny. They look properly like the future. And of course the new one is thinner and lighter, which are always magic words to us women, endlessly obsessed with our weight as we are.

I try to avoid doing anything as mundane as actually working on it - I cling on to the idea that when I'm in transit, it's the same as it was twenty years ago and I'm out of contact, unreachable, allowed to indulge myself. Essentially on a bit of a holiday. That goes for food too - one must resist the urge to scoff one's M&S Simply Food picnic within half an hour of getting on board, as on school trips of old. Your appetite may completely disappear on a long journey, as you have little to no idea what the hell the time is, but food is a method of entertaining yourself. Yes, that includes eating a yoghurt - pudding must be delayed to fill the last half hour of an evening trip.

I found myself entangled in a giggle of hens on a train the other week (is that the collective noun for a hen party? A shriek of hens, perhaps?) who were very definitely not playing by the rules, food-wise. They got on at Newcastle at about 11.00am and spent the first fifteen minutes flapping around, trying to ascertain where they were supposed to be sitting. 'Is that number 62?', 'Aye', 'Where's number 63? Is that it there?', 'Aye', 'Are you sitting on number 64?' 'Aye', 'Where's that then?' IT'S PROBABLY NEXT TO IT OR IN FRONT OF IT. JUST SIT ANYWHERE, THERE ARE LOADS OF BLOODY SEATS. Needless to say, the three empty seats surrounding me didn't last long.

The fact that they were all in red plaited wigs, or had their hair plaited and had T-shirts with sparkly slogans on them alerted me to the fact that they were going on a hen do to London to see The Wizard of Oz. Well, that and the paper plates printed with Wizard of Oz pictures that they produced to eat 'lunch' off at 11.30am. I felt distinctly lacking when I ate my lunch out of boring old Tupperware two hours later.

So, other people are another source of amusement, or torturous annoyance, depending on what they're talking about. (The Scottish lad, who, with his friends, spent two hours of one trip bellowing, 'RIDDLE ME THAT!' and then guffawing every time he said something nearly made me murderous). On Tuesday night, I was treated to a pair of hairdressers sitting behind me, who were clearly off to some kind of hair show. I became wearyingly familiar with the knowledge that one of them was intending to do something fancy with one model's hair, but couldn't know exactly what she was going to do, because she 'didn't know how long her hair was'. She must've said it 7 times to her friend. I was going to hazard a guess that the model's hair was shoulder length. It usually is. And if you need more of it, then you probably have loads of extensions with you, being a hairdresser an' all.

I was intrigued on one trip by a man who got on at York and sat next to me. He had no means of entertainment. None! No iPod. No newspaper (you're hard pressed not to be even in possession of a Metro these days). No book. Not even a phone to check text messages on. He stayed on till Durham, just gazing into space and fiddling with a sugar packet. It was a bit odd; you can pretend it's not weird sitting next to a total stranger for two hours when you're both engaged in something. But when one of you's just sitting there, it makes the other person either really self-conscious (especially as I kept looking over his head at the sunset over the other side of the carriage, which was very beautiful, but must've looked as though I was just staring at him), or really intrigued. Or both. Why is he going to Durham, I wondered. Why does he not have a coat, or any luggage (it was evening, and all he had was a kind of satchelly  man-bag)? What does he do? What's he thinking about? Being English, of course, I didn't try to engage him in conversation. I just wished I could, to satisfy my own curiosity. If we were American, we'd have been yakking away within minutes and exchanged our entire life stories by the time he got off.

There's a guy I pass on my walk into work nearly every day - he wears a uniform of indigo jeans, Converse shoes and a dark blue jacket. He is tall, with dark hair. He looks kind of like someone I know, or used to know (I still can't pinpoint who it is). We pass each other. We don't smile or acknowledge each other at all. We'll never speak (well, unless I trip over a paving stone and ram into him and have to say sorry; or fall over and perhaps he'll help me up again). If my life were a Richard Curtis film, that's what would happen. There'd be a big string section playing in the background, so that I'd know This Is the Man For Me, and we'd laugh about how much time we'd wasted, passing each other every day, not speaking and thus not being together. Maybe if I ever find myself sitting opposite him on a train, I'll speak to him.

'Are you stalking me?' is what I'll ask him.