On track - sort of

Below is Saturday's Irish Times' 'An Irishman's Diary', written by Patrick Logue.

A nice piece. But Patrick on what Irish Rail trains can one open the windows? And the 2001 rail strike was not the action of the NBRU. The dispute was the work of the now defunct ILDA, whose genneral secretary was Brendan Ogle.

"I went to see the doctor recently with a persistent cough. It had been niggling at me for a while, especially in the morning, and I needed the peace of mind that it wasn’t anything sinister. The doctor stuck a pipe up my nose that then went down the back of my throat and the camera at the end told him, and me, that nothing was very wrong. He told me I could be suffering from something called globus sensation, gave me a prescription and told me to avoid sugary foods and beer, particularly last thing at night. Working on that. 

What he didn’t tell me was that an irritable man on the 8.24 Enterprise train from Drogheda to Dublin on a particular Tuesday morning would ask me to “stop coughing in that manner”. 

I couldn’t believe it. A fellow passenger sitting opposite me was annoyed with the way I was clearing my throat, seemingly over and over again, and decided to “tackle” me in the most public way possible. 

Spluttering

“Are you seriously taking issue with the way I’m coughing on public transport?” I asked. “Absolutely”, he responded, “it gets wearing after a while”, before shutting his eyes and falling back asleep. Now, I hadn’t been spluttering in his face or anything close to that and it was clear that other passengers in the vicinity got the whiff of a serious row. I was furious and in my mind’s eye I was hurling serious personal insults at this man. 

But I managed to keep my cool and rise above it. I woke him up to continue the conversation. “I’ve been to the doctor with this cough, you know”, I added, as fellow passengers glanced over but made sure not to get involved in an argument between two strangers on a morning commuter train. He wasn’t interested in apologising or re-engaging. 

I went back to my Facebook and reading the newspaper on my phone, my cool having been kept. Just about, mind you. On leaving the train in Connolly Station, I couldn’t help getting the last word. “I hope the rest of your day goes better than the last half an hour”, I said. “No need to be nasty”, he replied. 

I worked out recently that over the last 15 years of commuting between Drogheda, Co Louth, and Dublin city centre, I have spent the equivalent of almost an entire year of my life travelling on a train. Over 15 years, allowing for holidays, weekends, bank holidays and sick days (the odd cough, and the like), I have spent what is a staggering 7,000 hours sitting or standing on a train carriage simply to get to and from the office. 

Commuting puts you in contact with all sorts of people, some of them a little strange.

A while back, a fellow passenger emailed my boss to take issue with the contents of a private email I had sent to a colleague from my iPad. She had read the email over my shoulder, taken a particular remark out of context and became so outraged with it she decided to contact The Irish Times.  

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