It’s a day after a rail strike and the 7:38 train to London is full. I’m on a priority seat, on the inside by the window. The woman on the outside seat let me pass to sit there. She had to get up and stand against an incoming stream. It wasn’t easy. People were rushing through the train to get to the few seats still available. I was lucky to be on the platform at the right place to be first in line standing by the train doors as they opened. A cyclist exited generating an eddy to move in through, un-rushed but firmly and with purpose because I could see a few empty seats. A few seconds determine whether you will sit or stand for fifty minutes. There’s a smell of tea tree oil from the person next to me. Masks do not filter smells. It could be worse. One passenger in twenty wears a mask. Sometimes when people look at me I sense a disapproving or condescending smile aimed at the motive behind …

This is a well-behaved train-set of passengers. A man with a colourful Amalfi coast themed shirt and a matching mask types noisily. And there’s a mother with her baby. The baby babbles and sings. What’s going on, asks the mother? The baby starts exploring the top of a bottle with its mouth. Direct sensory contact. Singing a sort of whale song. A girl on the table by the side has a water bottle with motivational text by the volume markers. It’s a kind of water clock with instructions on how much to drink by when. The last marker corresponding to 5 pm reads: “You’ve reached your goal, refill.” In the privacy of her row, the woman quiets the baby and a man in round glasses with his hair tied into a little greying bun looks at the baby happily. His round glasses sit low on his nose by the mask. This avoids the glasses steaming up. Outside, scrolling text on the outside of the train says “thank you NHS.” Once upon a time people stood …

Journey 1 There are more people waiting on the platform than I had expected. The 7:54 is delayed to 8:15 and a number of people take the slower train. Before the pandemic this would have been uncommon. Experienced commuters would know to wait for a delayed faster service. The delay is due to a shortage of train crew says the announcer. A familiar face walks by, a well kept mop of grey hair on a tall man, I remember standing next to him in 2019 at the far end of the platform for a chance to get a seat at the very front of the train for a faster jump out at the other end. He wears a mask lopsidedly, drooping down towards his chin on the right, and he carries a coffee that he might have just bought at the station shop.  The British Rail Class 387/1 comes into the station. It is gloriously empty, like a first class compartment all the way through. My bike goes into the lower part of the luggage …

On Line 6 from Gangcheng Road, a man moves nut beads around a string. The diameter’s length is about half a meter. The man rotates the nut husks quickly. They look like miniature walnuts. They are polished and gleam a bit. He wears garishly coloured training shoes and a golden bracelet and a golden necklace with a jade-like pendant. His head is shaved, he has thick lips and his black shirt features a tiger. M50 is a “creative park” in Shanghai. There are shops and studios. There’s a small coffee shop. Inside hangs a punching bag with a sign asking its viewer not to punch it. A stuffed rhinoceros toy looks out at the punching bag. It’s a coffee shop less than it is a tattoo parlour. The business model is tattoos and coffee. A fat cat lolls about. It needs its owner to feed it water through a syringe because it lacks volition to consume water. There is a tattoo in progress. An outline of activity is visible through a frosted glass screen. The target …

Like a commute, a Renaissance garden is a buffer between outer landscape and internal living: outside and inside, departure and arrival. A good commute would be like the Piccolomini Palace garden in Pienza. Opposite me a young man’s neck cranes down to his phone. His ears are covered by green metallic headphones. His perception is limited. His breathing oscillates. An excited crescendo is followed by a sigh. He leans forward sometimes and his stale breath enters my range of olfactory perception. The fold-out bikers coalesce into a peloton on Whidborne Street. It is not safe to cross the road until they pass. A man in a grey tracksuit and a woman by the window argue. He has a can of Red Bull on his table. His black training shoes are immaculately black. He is probably forty years old. The argument pauses. He asks me whether they are in the right carriage to King’s Cross. Two men at Starbucks talk about God. “I know I should be praying” says the one wearing a light beige coat, …

“The signaler tried to terminate us early at the last station.” A new reason for a morning’s train delay. Illusions become stale. Once you’ve seen the Müller-Lyer arrows they won’t fool you again. Psychologists may at some point in the future run out of illusions to illustrate the mind’s foibles. Follow simple rules and study the effect. For example, take a deep breath before you use an electronic device. What happens? Most of us become obsessed with work at some point. How many calories are channeled into corporate endeavours? There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, …

A bulky man in a jacket wears a gold watch and brown suede slippers. The lowest button of his jacket is done up in spite of his girth and the rules. Good rules are based on good stories. The story for the button rule is that Edward VII became so fat he couldn’t do up the last button on his waistcoat. In solidarity members of the court all set their last button free. This jacket is cream, beige, green with an orange square pattern. Two North Americans: He is wide, bulky with a Mammut jacket over a checked business shirt. His attention is focused on his phone. His wife is bored. He shakes his legs like a novice poker player excited by a mad bluff. The woman is slender, thin, younger looking. Her ears sport two large pearl earrings, her ring fingers carry jewel-studded rings. She is looking at her phone as well, but it is not the greedy look of the man. She has no choice. He is not paying her any attention and the …

Between Coulsdon and Redhill from the train I saw decommissioned red telephone boxes stand close together in the cold weather. What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick’s skull. The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton Perched by the window on a plane due to fly from Munich to London is a well-suited man with hair combed back from a widow’s peak who dominates more than the space he has paid for, V-legged, but one row behind the edge of alpha-class, where …