16 March 2010 - TRAIN OF THOUGHT by Richard Aronowitz, part three

There seems to have been a deplorable decrease in the use of mobile phones on our trains in recent years. I propose the establishment of a Mobile Phones on Public Transport Defence League, which we shall name with the nimble acronym MPOPTDL. Who will join me on my committee? Roll up, roll up, ye good folk of commuterland!

I mourn the passing of a golden age of rail travel, when one could follow the dramatic narrative arcs of as many as five one-way conversations within one's earshot at once. Here's Darren, a salesman from Tring in shiny grey slip-ons, firing off his figures from yesterday, and the odd smutty joke, to his boss in Barking; there's Dawn and her tummy troubles, whose depths she plumbs for her mother for all to hear without reddening her already rouged cheeks; and here again is Sam, a student from Ipswich Community College and, so his tongue-in-somewhere retelling says, part-time gigolo...

Where have all these monorail conversations gone? They were the fertile loam in which the characters that inhabit a commuter-writer's fiction could take root.

Do we talk less to one another these days? The silence of gentle breathing and quiet contemplation in our nation's railway carriages says that we do. MPOPTDL, now is your hour to shine!