This post doesn’t have much to do with writing, other than that I paid for a first-class ticket on a recent train journey because I wanted to be sure to get a table seat where I’d be able to write. The amount extra it cost to go first class was £10 (that covered both ways).
Over the course of the journey, at different times two young men who turned out to be on the train only for a couple of short segments and who I’m pretty sure didn’t have first class tickets came and sat down across the aisle from me. About 80% of the rest of the carriage was empty as well but they chose the little first class section.
So far, no big deal. It’s up to the train company to enforce their seating policy, and in this case they obviously didn’t care because no conductor ever came around to check. Also, the presence of these two guys didn’t affect me one way or the other—well, that’s not quite true: the second one had on a pair of headphones that was leaking very loud hip hop music and that was annoying.
What surprised me, though, was that both of them made a big show of sitting there, arms crossed, staring belligerently as though saying, “What are you going to do about it?” The look and the body language were very clear: “You are the enemy and f***k you.”
I felt like saying, “First, I don’t care where you sit, and, second, yes, I’m so rich I could afford to pay an extra five pounds each way—by the way, how much did your designer trainers and that iPod cost?”
Probably wisely, I didn’t. But it did leave me a bit sad that when times get harder, we seem to sink a little lower in our assumptions, our suspicions, and how we treat each other.
