My first week in my new role is over and I face 2 days at home now. It feels like, I imagine, how a solider would feel, seeing a beautiful empty Japanese garden after months in a barren, blood soaked warzone. Don't get me wrong though - the job, the people I work with, and the challenges I have to overcome are all fine. I'm enjoying them immensely, despite the usual nagging guilt that you get in a new job that perhaps you aren't doing all that you can, irrespective of just how much you have actually achieved. I think I've done pretty well though; I'm working in an industry that until this week was alien to me and it's taking a while to get my head around just how it works.
No, the warzone I'm leaving is the commute. I had forgotten just how tedious the commute to London could be, rose tinted it even. But, in reality, it's far worse now than it ever was before, and I've come to despise a place called East Croydon.
I live on the South Coast of England, in a small town called Eastbourne surrounded by hundreds of miles of vast open countryside. Eastbourne sits at the very end of a line of rolling grassland known as the South Downs, a breathtakingly beautiful part of England that did more than it's far share to lend England the moniker of being a "green an pleasant land". It's a place that still today captures the spirit of the old 40s and 50s black and white films where "chaps" wore smart suits to do the gardening, and women wore flowing ball gowns, kissed their husbands a cheery farewell in the morning, and then tended to making cookies and bread all day, singing Doris Day tunes gleefully. Despite the odd oik, beer swilling idiot, and brainless teen vandal, it's a place that sits in my mind right up there with the word "Disney", in the mental column that's labelled "nice". It's where I grew up.
East Croydon is home to a different type of person, a different species even. I'm sure there are plenty of people in East Croydon that would feel absolutely right at home in the rolling hills of the South Coast, but the majority wouldn't.
Each day, I catch the train to London. It starts at Eastbourne as an empty train, then gradually fills with more and more people until it reaches East Croydon. I have seen sights at East Croydon that I did not believe were humanly or physically possible. At East Croydon thousands of people board the train, cramming in through the cramped door ways like cattle until they are squashed together like sardines, and it always appears impossible that the doors will ever slide closed. Then, a few more thousand get in. Seriously. I watched it yesterday in fact - a train so jammed that people were standing in every available space in the train carriage and almost overflowing out of the doors and still more people joined, seemingly managing to fit in the train by osmosis, their bodies merging with those around them like cells hooking together in some perverse biology experiment. And the most incredible thing - they don't seem to mind.
It doesn't bother me too much in the mornings. I get on the train when it's empty and can sit where I like. In fact, more often than not I can find a seat with none around it whatsoever, near where people load their bicycles onto the carriage. The problem comes in the evening.
Every single train that leaves London Bridge station for the South Coast stops at East Croydon. So, the millions of people of a different species that live there flood towards the nearest, soonest departing train, and it's nearly always mine. In the evening the impossibly packed train of the morning looks like a deserted wasteland compared to what happens on the way home. If I can find a seat, which is rare, I always without question end up with my body being "rubbed" by people. The chairs in trains in England were designed by retired Nazi interrogators who have used every fibre of their years of training to produce the most excruciatingly painful experience every conceived if you sit in a packed evening commute train. Your feet get wedged back against you as you try in vain to keep them out of trampling range of the standing hoardes of East Croydon dwellers, or out of kicking range of those sitting opposite you. The seat height as well is designed such that your head is just about at waist height for those standing around you, meaningly you constantly have someone's arse shoved into it, their butt cheeks brushing your nose, or the sweaty groins of besuited men shoved violently towards your mouth with every sway of the trains carriage.
But the people of East Croydon don't seem to mind. I can't figure out just yet if they are more evolved than me, or less, but as I look around the train carriages on those trips home I see people gleefully chatting on their phones, bopping to their iPods, or reading the newspaper, oblivious to the fact that if the guy stood next to them farts there is no way they will ever escape inhaling it. I sit there with my skin crawling every second of the journey until finally East Croydon appears and the train seems to empty (comparitively).
This evening I got on the train first. I was late out from work, but early to the station, and managed to get myself a seat on the end of a row of three. There were only two seats opposite so it seemed perfect - I would have space on my right in the walkway if it didn't fill up (it did), and room to stretch my legs out if no-one was stood in front me (they were).
A short while later a chap sat down two seats to my left, leaving an empty one beside me, while the two seats opposite filled with a guy reading a comic, and a beautiful girl that smiled the warmest smile I've ever seen. "This will be a great trip home" I thought, and settled back to listen to my own iPod.
Then he arrived. The leader of the species that live in East Croydon. He was a towering man, an artists rendition of the rolling hills of home rendered in flesh. He sat in the empty seat to my left. Now I don't know if he had a medical condition that made his genitals so large that he could not, under any circumstances close his legs, but from the moment he sat down, his elbow in my ribs and his foul breath (this is a guy in a suit by the way, not some homeless bum) tracking a constant flow across my face, his legs splayed open, his thighs rubbing mine. My skin started crawling.
I moved slightly to my right, as far as I could in fact without leaving part of the seat. His leg seemed to follow. Thinking my self super smart I grabbed my handkerchief and violently blew my nose, intentionally slamming my leg against his causing him to move it, as I did so. Smugly I settled back in my seat, only to find the leg back again, almost stroking mine tenderly within a few seconds. I moved some more - it followed, so did his elbow. As he started to tuck into a huge bag of nuts, spraying nut husks and crumbs all over everyone around him, I move some more - my butt cheek now hovering in thin air. Still his leg followed me. The guy was almost doing the damn splits it seemed in order to just flow his mounds of beer tuned flesh into every available millimeter of space on that 3 person seat.
I'm english, it's hard for me to complain, but in my head I had variously screamed at the guy, poked his eyes out with my tablet PC pen, and magically produced a Saxon sword from my forefathers and rammed it through his neck. At one point I loudly complained that the guy was obviously a sexual pervert and was intentionally trying to touch me in order to turn himself on. THe whole carriage erupted in laughter and the guy got up and left, his face glowing with shame. In my head of course - in reality, I just sat there, crawling, actually developing muscles in my left side that could actually pull my skin away from him.
When eventually he actually lifted that fat, hot, sweating leg up and placed it in front of and over mine (really), I had enough. I jumped up indignantly and stood in the carriage way facing him. He scowled at me, giving me a look like I had just popped out percy and pissed all over his bag of assorted nuts. How dare I! How dare I remove myself from his amorous advances.
I stood there waiting for East Croydon to come into view wondering if perhaps it was me. Maybe I'm just weird and developing one of those obscure phobias that scary psychos have, you know, like fear of other people breathing, or fear of unseen germs on everything. When I noticed though that the guy had not moved at all, staying in place, legs akimbo, occupying his seat and half of mine so that he was still squashing another very uncomfortable looking chap against the window I realized it wasn't just me.
Those people from East Croydon - they just aint right.
As the carriage emptied I moved to find a new seat, pulling out a Glock 17 as I left and putting a slug straight into the guy's knee (in my mind anyway). 2 Days off, then only 24 weeks to go - it can't be that hard, surely?!
8:50:18 PM 
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