A couple of weekends ago I travelled up to Liverpool on a rubbish Virgin train where there weren’t enough toilets and there was a horrible smell at the end of each carriage and the heater by the window roasted my leg, and as I sat there trying to bury my miseries in a book a young woman two seats away kept intruding into my personal space by treating the train carriage as if it were her private office.
She was putting on one of those slightly husky, charm-itself, couldn’t-be-more-obliging, slyly bullying voices that women who use the phone a lot professionally are really good at, but you could tell she was a complete bitch. I hated her. So did everyone else in the carriage. We wanted to read our books or gaze vacantly into space, not hear this junior witch arrange for her car to be picked up from the garage and valeted and all those other tedious domestic details she insisted on broadcasting for all of us to hear. At one point she came up with the classic words, ‘I’m on the train.’And I called out, ‘So are we.’ Lots of passengers sniggered and the girl went quiet for about five minutes. Then she started up again.
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