Why I talk to strangers on the train

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/30/why-i-talk-strangers-train

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A Catholic priest once slept on my shoulder for two hours as we rattled through northern France. A lavender-scented woman once talked to me the whole way from Edinburgh to London, before handing me a small book of prayers and her postal address. I am writing this sitting next to a man with an Only God Can Judge Me neck tattoo who just spent the last 10 minutes telling me about the cat he wants to buy as we speed towards Weymouth. When it comes to transport, I am a magnet to the lonely, a beacon to the weary, a siren to the recently released.

It’s my fault, of course. I’ve just got one of those faces. One of those non-London faces that can’t help but snare eye contact and get caught on the branches of passing conversation. If there’s a person on a bus that wants to spread the word of Jesus or belt out a ballad of heartbreak, it’s a fairly safe bet that they’ll pick me as their lucky audience. And it is lucky. Like a cut-price Philip Larkin in sports leggings, nothing makes me happier than pulling out of a station, windows down, cushions hot, all sense of hurry gone and taking this velvet-seated moment of physical movement and social stillness to dive into a stranger’s life. Take Neck Tattoo – he got on just after Bournemouth and managed about four minutes, one look out of the window and one adjustment around his trousers, before asking me if he should buy a cat. “What would you call it?” I ask. “Dickhead,” he replied. Perfect.

With nothing more than an advanced single ticket and a love of puns to bind us, I have made a new friend. Talking of friends, moments later his ginger companion on the seat opposite sat up, looked me in the eye and twinkled: “I’ve got my dad saved in my phone as Davina, to make me look more popular.” It’s that kind of ingenuity that built us an empire, I tell him.

Of course, there is a serious downside to public transport infringement. As Women Who Eat On the Tube, TubeCrush, SleepyCommuters and PeopleOnTheBus taught us, public transport interaction is like trampolining naked – utterly ruined by the intrusion of camera phones and the internet.

Of course, I am aware that not everybody enjoys brief encounters and we don’t all like strangers on a train. There are tactics you can use to avoid these social advances. Put in headphones – only the most tenacious traveller will approach someone already plugged in. Hold up your newspaper – an actual newspaper – to avoid eye contact. Pretend to be asleep. Avoid table seats on trains – where the four-square picnic arrangement all but forces you to talk to your carriage companions. Or, if you can’t avoid them, you can at least cut short an unwanted transport conversation with a polite, but cold, one-word reply. Don’t ask questions, don’t give away personal information, don’t offer advice and if all else fails, just say you’d rather not talk – you’re feeling a bit sick. After all, nobody wants a stranger’s vomit on their shoes.

I am a cyclist by nature, so most of my transport chats last about three seconds, at the lights, and usually involve some bore of a Lycra warrior declaiming me for cycling in heels. This propensity to piston around the country under my own thigh-thickening steam also makes me utterly useless when asked for directions. And I am asked for directions all the time. I have lost count of the number of men in baseball caps and white tennis shoes I have walked down streets and across junctions, trying to find them the right entrance to the London underground. I have disappointed, beyond record, a host of shiny-shoed women rushing to invisible job interviews or lost on their way to dates. I couldn’t begin to tell you the helpless map-wringing tourists I have bewildered with my flapping arms and mournful eyes. Of course, as a child growing up in Oxford I used to – as a policy – direct all tourists asking for directions to either the police station or the city’s single dirty mags store The Private Shop. But I was young and foolish, and now I’m full of, well, if not tears, certainly shame.

But we’re pulling into Weymouth. Which means saying goodbye to my new train companion. He’s talking about quizzes: “Eggheads – I used to watch that. But the questions on it are fucking unbelievable. I can’t get a single one.”

And who are we to criticise him for chatting to strangers? After all, as the ink-blue scrawl across his neck says, only God can judge him.