ErasmusHobart.com

Recently, due to my wife’s new job, I’ve found myself making part of my journey home from work by public transport. Bus, followed by tram. And even after a matter of days it’s begun to irk me. It’s not so much that I no longer have my own space: buried in a book you can block out the people around you. It’s not even the din from headphones and mobile phones, annoying though these are. No, worse than any of these are the wasted minutes. Not being stuck in traffic – you get that in a car – but those inexplicable delays when the bus just pulls over and the driver spends several minutes counting cobwebs, or whatever it is they do, thus ensuring that you miss your connection and have another unnecessary delay waiting for the next one.

What’s silly, of course, is that these delays don’t generally amount to much. To quote Reggie Perrin – ‘eleven minutes late, leaf mulch at Golder’s Green’ or, in my case, ‘six minutes late, inexplicable wait by Nottingham Station’ – it’s clearly not so long as to be a major problem, but somehow, because someone else is in charge of my destiny I resent it. If I really wanted to get annoyed, I really ought to focus on the fact that my new journey home takes almost twice as long as the old one – over half of that on public transport. But because I’ve manipulated my schedule to minimize that effect, it becomes the little delays which niggle.

We live in a society dominated by time, almost controlled by it, and we sacrifice a great deal of it – perhaps not without complaint – but certainly without serious anger. When our forebears heard the news that we were switching to the Gregorian Calendar, moving New Year from March to January, there were riots – people genuinely thought that months of their lives were being stolen. Now, when another delayed train actually does steal an hour, we sigh, but do little more. Perhaps it’s because, with electric lighting we can use the nights more than our ancestors, perhaps it’s merely the resignation of a people who grew up with British Rail, who knows.

Only, of course, progress is very much a two-edged sword. It may be the case that our post-industrial society now means that many more of us travel to work, that the volume of commuter traffic means that a thirty mile journey to work can take two hours, but look back before the age of road and rail and you will find a time when the same journey was a day’s hard ride or two day’s march. And whilst the common man may rarely have travelled beyond the nearest market town, there were those who ventured far and wide, not just across England but across the world. Talking about a two year slog to the Holy Land or five years to the Orient puts six minutes extra crossing Nottingham into quite some perspective…