Reading Oils the Wheels

I’m on a train. Again. To London. Again. Tomorrow, I’ll repeat the process in reverse. Again. I know I’m not alone. Looking around me there’s about ten of us in this carriage, most gazing at their laptops, plugs in their ears, ignoring the world and each other. The poor stewards – are they still called that? – have to shout or nudge us to get any attention as they offer their drinks and food.

Probably on this very train there’s someone who’s just had the same thought, ‘How many years of my life have been spent on this route?’ I’m going to have a stab at calculating just that - something I've been meaning to do for a long time now.

Estimating (very) conservatively, I’ve completed one return journey (Manchester-London) per month for the last 25 years. Each return journey takes an average time of five hours, excluding travel time to and from the stations, end destinations, waiting and so on. Let’s see that’s …

12 journeys per year x 25 years x 5 hours = 1500 hours. Divide by 24 hours = 62.5 days.

Two months of my life? Four if you only count the waking hours. Can that be right? Doesn’t seem very much. Certainly not as much as it feels.

Even if you add in the waiting time – oh, the joy of Euston Concourse, such shops, such food, such company – it only adds about another 15 days or so. Which is a lot less than the time I spend sleeping. (Estimates on this vary but 27 years over the course of a lifetime seems about right)

Spending Time Wisely?
How have I spent these four months? More often than not I’ll read or work – say about 60% reading to 20% working. Some of time – say 5% - I’ll listen to music. The other 15%? Probably making calls, eating and drinking, gazing vacantly out of the window, calls of nature, chatting to fellow travelers and so on. So, reading mainly then.

For me, reading is a huge source of pleasure and of learning. I really don’t think it matters what you read so long as it’s something, anything. I’m always astonished at the number of people I see on trains doing nothing at all to amuse themselves. Just sitting. How bored they must be, I think, waiting for time to pass, when they could be losing themselves in the joys of a great, or even, yes especially rubbish, novel. I confess. Mostly I read novels, which is apparently a shameful activity for the working woman - I should be exercising my mind more usefully, people tell me. Mainly very dull people. The sort of people who spend their entire train journey peering at their laptops.

A Novel Joy
Well, I don’t care. I love novels. Good or bad, I’ve learned so much from them: what a ‘proper’ hero should look like; the perils of ‘big knickers’, why the oppression of women matters; (thank you Georgette Heyer, Helen Fielding, Marilyn French); the horrors of the criminal mind; what happened in the Channel Islands during the war; the dirty machinations of political life; the foundations of the Trades Union movement; the secrets of Mars – and that’s just a tiny, tiny list of all I’ve learned from reading novels.

Bless you novel writers everywhere. You truly shed light on darkness. And an awful lot of that light has been shed on an otherwise dull train journey. Thank you.