We've been doing a monstrous disservice to goldfish

As everyone knows, Londoners don’t talk to strangers. And heaven forbid that anyone should make eye contact on the Tube. But despite having lived in the city for decades now, I’ve never really found this to be true. My average day out and about is punctuated by pleasant little conversations with strangers. Now and then, without too much effort, I’ve hit chat jackpot and got an entire life story out of a fellow bus passenger in seven stops.

It seems that for many years we have been doing a monstrous disservice to goldfish

Still, old myths die hard, and Radio 4 is promoting the new series of Alexei Sayle’s Strangers on a Train by saying that the host’s mission is to ‘break the golden rule of travelling by train and actually talk to his fellow passengers’. I must confess that the one time I might not feel like talking to a stranger is if an encouraging voice came over the train tannoy, as it did here on the 11.46 East Midlands railway service from Nottingham to Skegness, and told me that Sayle was on board and ‘keen to chat to passengers about your journey today and also to hear your personal stories’.

I mean no disrespect to Mr Sayle, who seems a charming conversationalist, but for me the joy of public transport chat is that it is necessarily fleeting, unrecorded and without consequence, the opposite of that terrifying bar in Cheers where ‘everybody knows your name’.

But he had no shortage of takers, many of them on especially good form because they were en route to Butlin’s in Skegness. Two ladies from Bolton, named Leyla and Cecilia, came over to talk, sharp as tacks and headed for the holiday camp’s ‘Eighties bangers weekend’.