Dear LPG, 

I suppose that it is something that most of us might have forgotten how to do by now for more reasons than one, but I am sure that there are some pensioners out there who once used to work far enough from home to be a morning and evening commuter.  

I remember many an autumn and spring evening when I would find myself on a crowded train which had stopped on Hungerford Bridge during my first few working years, and in the 1970s getting home after a hard day’s work was a very different business. 

Many of us commuters would be traveling alone but with people that we knew by sight who regularly travelled on the same train at the same time every weekday evening and morning, and although there were so many of us, the ones who were lucky enough to get a seat would be either reading a newspaper or a book while the rest were all standing there ignoring all the other familiar faces for the most part.  Reading on a jogging train was something I was never good at doing, so I was a watcher rather than a ‘head in a book’ sort of traveller.  It was the part of the working day that we all loved to hate.

 But in spite of that, many people made more time to just gaze out the window and take in the river with all its lights and boats reflections moving around as the water rippled.  Even the view as the train travelled past other parts of the journey always held my interest as the land either side of the train lines revealed bits of the road, lots of greenery and many a back garden.   The sun, when it was not hidden by clouds, would pass between the buildings and behind the trees as it rose or set and for some reason, there seemed to be more time for just gazing out of the windows and watching the view gradually change with the seasons.  For me it was a serious escape from the very real world of work in those days, but trains have provided worktables so that the laptops and tablets had space to allow workers to be able to just continue working on the way home. 

Since I last commuted regularly, twenty years of retirement, and then Covid-19 have got in the way,  but I recently agreed a weekly commute which enables me to babysit my Kent-based grandchildren one day a week and although my journey takes me in the opposite direction to those who now work in Central London, nearly everyone has an e-Book on the go or a film to stream and watch during the journey, if they are not talking on their mobile, texting someone or playing an online game.  So many more of the London office workers seem to travel so much further, distance-wise but our very portable lifestyle means that not a moment of time wasting is necessary.

To my mind, the time wasting element of commuting gave our minds time to adjust and slow down but, from what I can see, all that seems to be a thing of the past for those who do it by train these days…

BD, Bellingham.