MacBook Girl, Greasy Guy And The Make-Up Lady

It's true, I don't want to speak to or engage in any sorty of communication with my fellow commuters but that doesn't mean that I'm totally oblivious to them. I know they're there, naturally, especially the ones who engage in an unspoken war of minor shifting in order to gain more ground on the double seat. I'm starting to recognise familiar faces, though; people like me who get on not just the same train but the same carriage every day of the week.

There's Oversized MacBook Girl, for example. She seems to have purchased the device with the main specification being that it's three times too large for her lap. She generally spends the entire thirty five minute frantically tapping away at her emails, whilst threatening to annex the lap of the person seated next to her (which has been me on occasion and has caused me to... well, betray no reaction whatsoever and try harder to focus on my book while trying to ignore her frantic tapping and the fact that I'm in danger of becoming a lap extension; it's the English way).

A stop or two further on, Greasy Hair Guy gets on. He has slightly thinning hair on top which he has slicked to within an inch of life and clumps together in thin slimy fronds at the top of his forehead. This combined with his small, beady eyes gives him the look of a man who hobbies include touching himself at inappropriate times and mole-strangling. He may well be a perfectly lovely bloke but he really needs to drop the creepy serial killer look.

Make-Up Lady is next and she spends the entire journey re-applying her make-up in a slow methodical fashion while staring into a ridiculously small hand mirror. I say "reapply" as it doesn't look as if she forgotten to put her make-up on before she left the house when she starts working away at her face. She reminds me of the two girls on one of the floors below at the office who spend their breaks busying away with hair straighteners in one of the meeting rooms (maybe hair needs that much constant attention - I don't know, it's a foreign country to me).

These are my fellow commuters then and I feel like, in some small way, I'm beginning to know them. Just don't any of you talk to me. I'm reading my book.