The Living Room Book Group

I had the depressing experience of travelling from Durham to Oxford - yes, there and back in a day - last week, the travelling equivalent of waiting on death row.  I waited for trains that were late, dirty, crowded and in one surreal moment, a train that didn’t exist at all.  Because I knew it was going to be a very long journey I took a a copy of Alice Munro’s short stories but I’d finished this before I’d even passed through Birmingham.  On the last interminable leg of the journey when I considered it would be quicker walking back to Durham, with nothing to read and nothing to do, an equally harassed passenger sat next to me, a man with lovely hands and who smelled of French cologne. Train travel is surprisingly intimate especially in second class which is all I can ever afford (make that, ‘barely afford’).  Our elbows had a brief wrestle on the arm rest, fighting gently for a little space but I like the fact he didn’t, as some men have done, shove me off unceremoniously.  And then his beautiful hands open up a copy not, mercifully, of the Daily Mail but of Robert McFarlane’s ‘The Wild Places’.Is it possible to fall in love with someone on a train on the basis of their reading material, I wonder, or has ten hours travelling across country robbed me of all reason?  I wanted to tell him how beautiful I thought the book was but I know that if someone began talking to me when I’d just sat down and started to read I would have been murderous.  So I stare out at the dark night and imagine the words on the page floating through his head transporting him out of this cramped, noisy hell-hole and up into the mountains, the sunshine and the sweetness of birdsong.