Strangers on a train, mutual curiosity, nosiness and the rewards of open conversation.

There’s always a choice about whether and when to engage with others.  On the tube, on the train in London, squashed alongside other travelers, all of us with our tired anonymous faces we could be anyone.  I don’t know if it is a peculiarly British thing or not, but we seem to work hard to protect our own space.  If we can’t create physical space around ourselves on crowded public transport, it’s as if we surround ourselves with a virtual invisibility shield, avoiding eye contact, ignoring the awful reality that our nose is stuffed into someone else’s armpit and someone else’s bag and elbow (or worse) are rubbing up against our backs.  Heaven portend that we would risk initiating a conversation, what a breach of etiquette that would be!  Journeys are to be endured and solitary as far as possible, whether that is through willing ourselves away by making it out to be an almost out of body experience, or diving into a book, newspaper or kindle to take us away from the living hell of such unwelcome close proximity to others.  That is the receive wisdom at least, but it seems mutually anarchic spirits can buck the trend and find welcome joyous release.  This is my experience of engaging with a stranger on a train.

So, I’ve had an awful couple of days away from home.  It’s complicated, but suffice to say I’ve had an emotionally bruising time, I am so sleep deprived I’m actually shaking, and I haven’t had a proper meal for three days. Recent events have thrown me, and now I’m wondering if going away to Vietnam is in fact a viable option, I honestly have no idea what to do.   Exhaustion doesn’t begin to cover it, I feel almost traumatised and confused, and if I had the choice, rather than get on a public train and endure a journey home, I’d like to roll myself into a foetal position and for the ground to swallow me up and to just disappear into the earth for good.  However, practicalities will out.

I do get on the train.  I find my seat reservation, and leaving my lighter bags strewn across two seats drag my larger case to the luggage rack further up the train.  When I return, I find a woman peering at her reserved seat, which is next to mine, and currently inaccessible because of all my crap, my immediate reaction is ‘oh no, I’m going to have a neighbour.  I wont be able to sob quietly and drink my much needed coffee and eat my outrageously expensive muffin because that’s a breach of traveling etiquette‘  Then something happened, I just thought, it can be different.  I’m about to go traveling, I need to practise social interaction and I need to get a grip.  I made a choice, a choice to engage and it turned out to be one of the most interesting, stimulating, funny, life affirming conversations I’ve had in years.  I struck absolute gold.

So it began simply enough, my neighbour got out a sandwich too, and I just said ‘I’m so relieved you are eating too, I’m starving but thought it would be rude to eat if you weren’t when we are shoulder to shoulder‘… and that was it we were off.  She explained she too was starving because she’d been on a course where there wasn’t anything vegetarian for lunch, embarrassingly her hosts had offered fish, but, as a fellow vegetarian I know all too well that isn’t vegetarian at all.  If people wish to eat fish that’s fine (depending how it’s sourced I suppose) but as fish clearly swim about and have eyes etc I think it should be a self-evident truth that they are not part of a vegetarian diet.  So thus we bonded, and then there was no stopping us.  Ironically, I don’t think either of us actually finished our snacks.  We talked for the entire journey from London to Derby where the train terminated.  We talked through the nearly 90 minute delay caused by an incident at Millhouses Broadway and I learned loads.

Perhaps it was mutually refreshing because we touched on loads of controversial topics with an openness I have rarely experienced, it was the joy of exploration of ideas and trying to understand different perspectives.  We talked about religion:Sikhism specifically and it’s early origins, I tried to remember my O level RE syllabus and quizzed my companion about the five principles of Sikhism and found out more about the religion in 20 minutes than I have in the past 50 years.  All enlightening and positive.  I liked the practical pragmatism expressed, brilliant.

So after religion we talked about politics: education policy, Ofsted inspections, academy status schools.  Then we moved onto cultural difference, when to accept and respect cultural difference and when it is OK to challenge it.  For example, in some cultures eye contact is not respectful but insubordination, or between men and women can be seen as a sexual come on, how then do you advise someone from a different cultural frame of reference to behave e.g. in a job interview?  Is it culturally oppressive, to suggest they modify their behaviour, or is it culturally sympathetic to make them away of a different set of cultural expectations by which they need to abide in order to succeed in the UK context?  We talked about women in Saudi Arabia, inequality in Dubai, poverty in India it was brilliant.  We may not have put the world to rights but we certainly looked under a fair few stones.  We reflected on the challenges of integrating into new social groups, the nature of volunteering, when to intervene if witnessing bad behaviour or harassment by or of others in a public space.  We shared stories with each other of our own reactions to events we witnessed. We talked about domestic violence, mental health, it was like a smorgasbord of taboo topics, spread out before us, and we dived in like children years ago, given free rein at the Woolworths’ pick’n’mix counter and my goodness it was joyful and liberating.  Due to me mishearing her I thought she described as her family as like ‘well, mallards‘ in fact she said ‘well – mannered‘ so that was a great bit of confusion which took us down a delightful cul de sac of considering what the personality attributes of mallards might actually be, and subsequently took us onto other animal comparisons which we attributed to people we knew which was a very effective way of describing them.  Meerkat, giraffe – you get the idea.

We talked about  personal things too, my companion shared her perspective on caring for her father when he was dying and the intimacy, privilege and tenderness of that relationship.  Her insights chimed with my recent experiences too.  We shared concerns about career, finance, future, no topic was off limits, we found common ground and shared understanding, and also gained new perspectives too. We discussed sense of identity, ethnicity, regional location.  We talked about volunteering, Parkrun, how her three year old was so delighted and enchanted recently by the deep white snow – and then utterly distraught when it melted.  It seems they had thought that snow, once it came, just stayed forever (actually to be honest it feels to me like that’s exactly what it’s done, but I’m not three, and I haven’t had my snowman melt without warning)

We talked about what defines Britishness, and from that, what should I take with me to Vietnam to help communicate our culture.  Should I go for stereotypes even though they hardly exist (cream teas, cooked breakfast, roast dinner – all a bit compromised by my vegetarian status in any event, besides which, isn’t curry more appropriate?).  Alternatively maybe it would be more truthful to go down the ‘we are all different, we are all the same, irrespective of country of origin’ mantra.   I was a bit thrown by the suggestion I should take a cue, but that was my oral stupidity, doh queue was what was actually being suggested.  A game of monopoly, a flag, it was amazing where the conversation took us.  I don’t think I’ve ever really reflected on my personal identity so deeply, I don’t particularly think of myself primarily as British, I sort of take that as a given, and might ascribe other adjectives first (female, vegetarian, fifty) – but placed overseas where I think there won’t necessarily be anyone else from the UK it is being Caucasian British that are likely to be my most defining characteristics from the perspective of others.

So what is the point of this post?  Well, I think it is to say that it is worth the risk of talking to new people.  We could have sat silently on that train, for a long long journey, in mutual irritation at our loss of personal space.  Instead a conversation took me to a new place of vivid understanding.  It was like a really intensive philosophy seminar or something.  Reflective and challenging it was great to think properly about new topics, to get a different perspective on the world and to rekindle my appetite for discovery.  Furthermore, it distracted me from my inward looking pity-fest, and made me look up and outwards, and trust me that was a much more exciting and awe-inspiring view.  On my travels, however tired I am, I must remind myself to slap on a smile, be curious and engage.  I am unlikely to regret it, I can sleep later, I have to embrace the opportunity to explore new things, places, people and ideas now, before the moment passes me by.

I’ll probably misrepresent it, but my traveling companion talked to me a bit about a Sikh concept which seems to be essentially around curiosity and openness.  The idea being that things never ‘come from nowhere‘ there are always signs, you have to be alert to them.  Even if my level of understanding is rather crude, I love the idea, it will be one I shall try to keep with me on my journey.

Finally we arrived, we shook hands we made brief introductions, and wished each other good lives in the future.  I doubt our paths will cross again, that’s a shame. but it doesn’t matter I still felt enriched by our meeting, and maybe the candor we embraced was only possible because ultimately we were then, and remain still, just strangers on a train.  Even so, if you are reading this my new travel friend, thank you, sincerely, what a great journey we shared.