The devil sits in the quiet carriage

I got the opportunity to experience the quiet carriage the other day, for the first time ever.

I'll admit, I was a bit giddy with excitement at the prospect of a whole carriage full of middle-aged, miserable, misanthropic pedants just waiting for the opportunity to quote railway by-laws to anyone careless enough to sneeze at a volume in excess of eight decibels.
These should have been my people. It should have been perfect.

But it wasn't.

Far from being a haven of simple churlish unhappiness, the quiet carriage was in fact a 40-tonne tube full of seething resentment, barely contained aggression and emotional ugliness. A paper bag rustled and twenty pairs of accusatory eyes glanced sideways. A lone cough in the distance released 50 tuts and 112 sighs.

We stopped briefly outside Didcot and in the silence, the merest hint of MP3 hi-hat could be heard from across the gangway. I truly thought the mob was going to rise up as one and strike down the bloke responsible. He was oblivious of course, eyes shut as he drifted happily along to his music. I wanted to reach over, shake him and yell: "For Christ's sake man, they're on to you! Run... run while you still can! Save yourself!"

One chap, one poor misguided fool, spoke into his mobile phone. A crass, schoolboy error. A particularly pinched-faced man was first to his feet (but others were poised), jabbed his fingers in the direction of the miscreant and angrily berated him, in the nasal tones of a John Major or Ken Livingstone, as to the error of his ways. He didn't quite quote "Regulation 57, sub paragraph 8..." but he might as well have done.

Christ, this was a whole different level of miserableness and I felt well and truly out of my depth.

After I while I started to get annoyed by the sheer weight of all that hatred in the air. Not least the constant looks from the grumpy old sod next to me every time I crumpled a newspaper page as I folded it. It was really starting to wind me up and I had to resist the urge to react. I don't think I have ever wished to be in possession of a bugle before, but by Christ I wish I had one then.

Then, at Swindon, grumpy bastard got off and a sweaty cyclist got on and sat next to me. Obviously I scoffed at the fact that he spent ten minutes unpacking his poxy iTwat computer (white, naturally) and proceeded to plug in his headphones and use it to watch an episode of Top Gear, surely the one programme in television history that perfectly defines the rotten core at the heart of humanity thanks to that braying, pasty-faced, slack-jawed twat Clarkson, his idiotic psuedo-foppish right wing sidekick and the tiny little irritating smug one, all masturbating over some crappy motor or other, as if anyone gives a shit.

But the one thing this perspiring idiot next to me did do is to open my eyes to a whole new world of quiet carriage possibilities. This bloke had clearly cycled a long way on a hot day before getting on the train. He stank. He really stank. Sweaty, hot, man-stink. Disgusting.

Disgusting... but silent. Oh yes. Silent.

That's when it dawned on me - I had been cowed by the sheer force of noise-related hatred in that carriage, but the rules clearly only forbid annoying other people by the single sense of hearing. Yes, there are FOUR WHOLE SENSES just waiting to be used as weapons to annoy the horrid little tossers who hang out in Carriage A.

And so now an endless world of possibilities has opened up and I CANNOT WAIT to get back into the quiet carriage. It's three solid hours between Swansea and London. Three hours that belong to me and the disgusting misuse of four of the five senses. The quiet carriage will be mine. Where to start, where to start...