It’s 7:17am, and the train is just about to leave Marlow station (as I type, the engines roar, and we rumble forth into the bright morning sunshine).
The man behind me is coughing his lungs up once more, and not covering his mouth. I find myself wondering - not for the first time this week - at what point somebody is going to take him to task over his horrific lack of consideration for fellow travellers.
His unwitting behaviour reminds me of the thought that there are two kinds of people in this world - those who “put”, and those who are “put upon”. I think perhaps those of us who try to have a quiet life - who bend our day to fit around others - usually without their knowledge - are the “put upon”.
As we make steady progress along the side of the river Thames towards Bourne End, the fields are a perfect picture of England - rolling green hills, hedgerows, boat yards, and countless families of ducks, geese, swans, rabbits and various other riverbank animals out scouting for their first food of the day. During the floods earlier in the year I feared the families of rabbits may have been wiped out, but as soon as the waters retreated, they returned in huge numbers - strangely greater than before. The weeks spent in new burrows on higher ground must have been industrious ones.
We arrive at Bourne End, and depart one train for the adjacent one, which waits to deliver us into Paddington, London. Following a fight with the London Underground commuters I will arrive at my destination and descend into the artificially lit world of the software developer once more - to pore over so many thousands of lines of unintelligible code - and to invent, create, and to gently bend the workings of the machines to my will.
We are passing Cookham, and rows of middle England houses flash by - perfect in their “keeping up” fashions of flat lawns, neat rows of flowers, manicured perfection. Each house hides a driveway with two cars; one an expensive sportscar, the other a gargantuan school-run tank - sold with warnings that if you hit a child in it, they will be killed. That’s okay for these people - as long as they are safe, the rest of the world be damned.
Allotments roll past. Rows an patches of beans, potatoes, onions, courgettes, pumpkins and aubergines abound with old men bending double in last years clothes to tend their produce.
Maidenhead Station beckons through the public address system aboard the train, and I prepare to contract into my corner of the carriage - faced with the impending arrival of the masses. The spare seats around me will be taken up by a variety of either entirely objectionable or acceptable people. British trains are not designed for unthinking, tall, untidy or fat people. If you perchance do not fit within any of those catagories your journey will be stress free - however in a carriage of a hundred people, there will be a percentage of the minorities causing immense grief for the remainder.
It is time to retract. Time to take up less room. No more room to type. A coffee lands on the table directly behind me, and a gentleman unfurls a laptop, a magazine and a newspaper alongside me. We haven’t even reached Slough yet, at which point the constriction will double.
Wish me luck in surviving what is rapidly becoming the normal experience of the morning commute.