LUV & HAT

LUV - Fact: Going anywhere on public transport is a billion times better than going by car.

Being involuntarily force-fed tinny phone music by aggressive schoolgirls on buses is how I keep up with what kids like. And no car journey of mine has ever been interrupted by a stranger clambering in through the passenger door to either a) play the trumpet, b) ask for money or c) take his trousers and pants off and dance around unprompted. All three of these things happen to me on the London Underground EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

Plus I like to imagine that, whenever Jeremy Clarkson thinks about public transport, his prostate scabs up. I love public transport for no other reason than that.

However, there is one slight issue I do have with public transport. And that’s the public.

I fucking hate the public. All of them, with their horrible clothes and their unjustified sense of entitlement and their walking slightly too slowly and their noisy respiratory systems and their faces and their mouths and the fact that they even exist. Ugh.

Imagine how brilliant public transport would be without the public. Imagine what it’d be like to take a train somewhere and not have to endure a dickless arsehole in a suit bellowing into his phone about acquisitions while glancing around to make sure that everyone else in the carriage can see what a big deal he thinks he is.

Imagine how nice it’d be not to sit in front of a twitching, babbling toddler who can’t stop kicking the back of your chair and screaming “MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY BURSDAY BEESDAY NEESDAY TREESDAY BLEEBLOO BLEEBLOO BLEEBLOO ARRRGH!” again and again all the way to fucking Penzance while his exhausted father - clearly on the verge of a full-scale breakdown - ineffectually murmurs “Please stop, Fabian” while he idly daydreams about drowning the little fucker in a puddle.

This is why the quiet carriage is perhaps the best accomplishment of all mankind. It’s a train carriage where all noise is frowned upon. Banned, even. You can’t talk too loudly in a train carriage. You can’t use your phone. You can’t call for help because you’re suffering from the early stages of a heart attack. It’s wonderful. And so what if all the other quiet carriage passengers are all insufferably pious, smug, tutting middle-aged Radio 4 listeners? You never have to talk to them. This is the beauty of the quiet carriage.

In fact, I don’t think that quiet carriages go far enough. I welcome an unconscious carriage, where all my fellow travellers are stabbed in the neck with an industrial sedative as soon as they sit down, so that I can sleep and look out of the window and play Whale Trail without distraction. Make it happen, Southern Railway. I have money.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - In principle, I approve of quiet carriages on trains, because long-distance train journeys are awful. They should be sleepy sojourns on gleaming trains that snake through twilit mountainry as you snuggle against a rain-spattered window and fall into a dreamy half-slumber that’s only disturbed ONCE, by a kindly old tea lady selling hot chocolate and buttery doorstep sandwiches from her trolley.

But instead they’re horrific.

Firstly, they never announce the platform until three minutes before your train departs, so you end up dousing yourself in watery latte as you pelt across the station concourse. Then you struggle down an aisle full of arseholes and elbows and discover that your reserved seat has been nabbed by a fucking opportunist deafblind NUN whom you can’t oust because you’re not a monster. Finally you secure a seat in the rancid toilet carriage, book-ended by a) an open-mouthed gum chewer who’s really into cheap earphones and the hi-hat, and b) a girl who sucks her teeth and shouts “THEN I WAS LAK AND SHE WAS LAK AND THEY WAS ALL NAMEAN?” into her phone forever, OR all the way to Inverness, whichever of those is the shorter duration.

In theory, the quiet carriage should be a sanctuary from all this, but in reality it’s a terrifying tyranny of silence.

You can’t do anything in the quiet carriage without someone disapproving of it. Snap open a drinks can and a Young Conservative will give you the evil eye. Shift unexpectedly in your seat and a geography teacher will actually spit in your face. Because in a world without loud talkers and inefficient headphones, somehow you - with your deafening CRISP PACKET and your antisocial BAG with a ZIP - are the bottom-feeder.

And I object to this. I’m a decent person. I always have my phone on vibrate. I don’t litter. I don’t audibly hawk mucus up the back of my throat. So why should I live in fear of someone in a twin-set body-slamming me if I breathe too loudly?

Especially as, at some point, unfailingly the girl with the loud phone voice will stumble into the quiet carriage and continue talking at several thousand decibels, and no one will bat an eyelid. She’ll slump in her seat and distractedly kick the deaflbind nun, but no one will shush her or say ACHLEE THIS IS THE QUIET CARRIAGE ACHLEE? to her.

Because they’re afraid of her. They’re not afraid of you because - let’s face it - you’re reading Cloud Atlas and drinking an Appletiser, but they’re afraid that she will stab them.

And, to be frank, after I’ve spent an hour silently turning the pages of my novel with the care and precision of an open-heart surgeon to avoid offence, I wouldn’t care if she did.

So long as she did it quietly.
- Robyn Wilder