Every now and then I try to invent a new scientific unit. I’ll never come up with anything as good as the millihelen — a unit of beauty sufficient to launch one ship — or the Sheppey, which is a distance of approximately seven-eighths of a mile defined as ‘the minimum distance at which sheep remain picturesque’. But I do have hopes for the tedion, which measures the half-life of boredom: it denotes the time you must spend in a location to enjoy a 50 per cent chance of overhearing someone say something interesting or funny.
On a train to Cardiff or Manchester, a tedion is probably around five to ten minutes. On a Home Counties commuter train it runs into days — or in London, the conversational nadir of the UK, weeks.
In Wales I caught this exchange: ‘So how do you know they’ve had sex?’ ‘Well, I saw her in Abergavenny, and she was wearing his wellies.’ In London you could spend a year on public transport and never hear anything above the level of ‘So we decided to use Dave’s departure as an opportunity to restructure procurement.’ In London the need to look busy trumps the need to be interesting. By contrast, in laid-back cities like Liverpool and Dublin the banter bar is set very high.
So that’s one reason I never use the quiet carriages whose abolition Peter Jones lamented in a recent article in The Spectator. Living in Newcastle, Peter is probably well supplied with colourful Geordie aperçus. To those of us trapped in London, a train journey is the only chance we get to overhear any decent conversation.
But the other reason I hate these carriages is that, unless you are a Trappist monk, it is almost impossible to use them without incurring sanctimonious disapproval from some self-appointed noise-Nazi.
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