Y esterday I was on a train for six hours — three there, three back, through two time zones and three weather conditions, and all of it without my headphones. Around me, passengers built little homes for themselves out of laptops and crisps, a whole universe on a plastic fold-down table.
The computer screen acted primarily as a barrier, an emotional-load-bearing wall. Objects and arms were removed from sleeves and erected in delicate piles — illusions of privacy were magicked in the quiet coach. Rooms were fashioned on laps behind seats, or ideas of rooms; walled, breaded concepts — here is a kitchenette formed from Pret a Manger baguettes and precarious coffees, here is the memory-foam neck pillow, a portable bedroom, and here onscreen at km an hour is a working office, fizzing with legitimacy and blue light.
I looked around with love at this side of us, we silly animals, building homes out of sticks anywhere we sit for longer than 20 minutes. On smaller screens, my travelling neighbour pecked at a two-hour game of Candy Crush, while across the aisle a young man blue jumper, skin that appeared to be enamelled was playing blackjack.
Outside, the fields were touched with ice and the plastic bags in trees hardened into the shapes of birds. Lone shipping containers sat confused on gravel, a hill rose like a hip and sunk into mist. There was a low white fog that suggested some kind of hidden beauty, beyond the muddied vitamin warehouses and lorry parks and small haunted farmhouses surrounded by their silent dogs.
When the train went into a tunnel I was suddenly confronted by my own resting face reflected in the black glass, jaw clenched, eyes hooded and I gasped, causing my Candy Crush neighbour to jump. I met his eye with not a flake, not a crumb of judgment, not one. Last week the chief executive of Ryanair called for airports to impose a two-drink limit on visitors after one of their flights had to be diverted from Lanzarote to Porto due to an inebriated passenger.
