Public Or Private

For the last few years I have gone back to working in London and therefore have been engaging in the fun and excitement that is the public transport system. And yes it has provided me with many mornings and evenings of frustration, amusement and sometimes even total hilarity so it's all good. But in the past I did the prviate car commute from Surrey to Buckinghamshire so I did the daily slog up the M25 and M40 every day.

When I first decided to do this 70 mile round trip for work every day I saw a piece of grafitti by the side of the road on the M40. It said "Why do I still do this every day?" At the time it made me laugh, it was a new experience to be doing that trek but I'll tell you what, by the time I made the decision to leave that job and make my way back onto the public transport network I found myself nodding every time I passed it.

But even that travel, which was exhausting to the extreme, had it's little highlights of daily amusement.

There was something terrifying and yet incredibly amusing about watching a woman putting on her lipstick, whilst also balancing a coffee in the other hand and travelling down a hectic M25 fast line at around seventy miles per hour. Strangely enough I found myself at the time thinking that putting on your lipstick and drinking coffee was inherently pointless as half the lipstick would surely come off on the cup...?
It's also the only place I ever found myself watching a man juggling a mobile phone and a bunch of paperwork and driving his car all at the same time. Important meeting or just raging moron, you decide....

The decisions people make in their cars are funnier in essence, as the car grants people the fake anonymity of the belief that no one can see what they are doing. People are inside their own space when driving, and it's so easy to forget that the "outside world" can view your every action. However the dumb things people do whilst driving are also scarier as they can actually have an impact. I'm fairly sure that juggling paperwork, coffee, mobile and makeup on the train to Waterloo is pretty much never going to cause said train to go off the rails...

Still there is a wonderful fascination of watching people in cars, safe in their little bubbles and totally unaware of the scrutiny that they may well be under. I'm fairly sure the lady in the back seat of a car on the M25 one morning would have altered her decision to get undressed and changed on the move if she had taken a moments pause and considered the display that she was putting on for the other commuters on the road that day... Although you never know, maybe some people are just exhibitionists like that...