- A working day averaging 11.5 hours in an inner London secondary school
- Not having eaten since before noon
- Getting on a train home at 7.30pm
- Nursing an obsessive hatred for discourteous people
- Self-diagnosed misophonia aka ‘select sound sensitivity syndrome’ or ‘sound rage’
- A firm belief in the current existence of an inexorable social malaise
- Being an irritable and moody bastard
What you get is a journey home from work each day in which I punctuate attempts at escapism (reading a novel about brutal murders in the creepily remote Icelandic countryside) with shooting homicidal side-eyes glances at fellow commuters guilty of the following hanging offences:
1. Watching videos or playing games on their phones without headphones. The videos tend to be short and quite possibly amusing to watch, something someone has posted on Facebook no doubt, and therefore, in the minds of those with retarded social sensibilities, unlikely to cause offence if played loud for half a minute in a confined public space. Wrong, you bollock. A sudden shattering of (usually a temporary) silence by the distorted cackle of laughter that soundtracks most of these videos only serves to make me wish for a superpower in which I am able to telekinetically cause objects of my choosing to force themselves twelve inches up their owner’s anus. The same applies to mindless phone games. I’m happy to support other people’s rights to their own escapism, but the electronic sound of bubble-popping coming from a game designed for monocellular cerebral organisms like the mindless twats addicted to them does indeed tempt me to support organisations advocating forced euthanasia of the stupid.
2. Loudly having a work conversation on the phone. In a self-important attempt to demonstrate that they have a busy job of making big decisions and telling people what to do, it seems that some train bastards are either actively craving a public audience or inconsiderately oblivious to the fact that they have one. You never hear anyone talking loudly on the phone to someone at work in a compliant way, agreeing to follow an instruction or asking what they think. This behaviour is always a narcissistic showboating of whatever petty authority they happen to be endowed with in their dull and pointless, paid occupation. Again, that wished-for superpower would save us all from this aural irritation.
3. Placing bags on the seat next to them, particularly when they sit on the outside. This is the strategy of the selfish to discourage less confident fellow commuters from asking if they ‘may sit there’. No matter that a train is busy and undoubtedly someone will want to sit there. They expect to be asked, because they have already laid claim to that extra seat by plonking their bag there in the manner of a 19th century British imperialist, territorially erecting a flag and daring the indigenous inhabitants of the land to challenge their audacious act of expansionism. My first desire is that if they’re going to act in a territorial manner then so will I, by pissing on the spare seat. But you know what they say about who you’d give the steam to, so I usually settle for just telling the cunt to move.
4. Eating. There is rarely an excuse for eating on a train. There is never an excuse for chewing with your mouth open. No one enjoys the descant of saliva-soaked slurping or that malignant combination of crisp-packet rustling and crisp-crunching consumption. To cope with this I scroll through Facebook hoping that someone has posted a video of pigs eating cold sick so that I can play it loud.
5. Man spread. I shouldn’t be too intolerant here. If your brain has made its way from your skull to your bollocks then I guess it must be uncomfortable to have your legs at anything less than a 180 degree angle.
My train pulls into St Albans at 8pm. My wife usually collects me from the station. Apparently I’m a real joy to have in the car at this time.
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