Who’s to blame for my terrible journey?

Look out. Here comes a column banging on about something that, in the grand scheme of things, really doesn’t matter. But I’ve just turned 70 and surely among the compensations for old age must be the right to have a jolly good grumble from time to time. Mine, here, will be about the new hard train seats. ‘They feel like sitting on an ironing board,’ passengers are complaining.

Since the beginning of last year, and all over the country, rail operating companies have been rolling out (hallelujah! — a chance to use this ghastly expression entirely appropriately) a new kind of railway carriage. First it was Thameslink; then it was GWR; and last week I suffered in one of these carriages going all the way to Leeds. My buttocks ache at the very recollection.

In most respects these new trains are fine: light, airy, with a spacious feeling about them — in fact as you board the immediate impression is of an improved environment for passengers. Until you sit down. Ouch! Honestly, an ironing board would be more comfortable, with at least a little bit of give. These surfaces have none. Even a decent wooden chair has a shallow cupping to the seat which helps spread the body weight evenly. But with this monstrous carriage furniture the bones in your bottom bear down straight on to what feels like a square of flat MDF, upholstered in thin carpet.

Of course an increasing number of my fellow citizens these days have such enormous bums that any sense of what they’re sitting on is cushioned away by blubber and they probably wouldn’t notice even if they were sitting on rocks, but at least a few of us still have what you might call haunches. We like the soft seats on the London Underground; we’re comfortable on the sprung fabric in East Midlands Trains carriages; if we’re price conscious and travel by coach or low-cost airline we can still expect a soft seat for the journey; and on getting home we look forward to sinking into an armchair or sofa, not banging down on to a piece of hardboard.