I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
— Small Kindnesses, Danusha Laméris
I first heard Laméris’s poem two years ago, around the same time I used to get the Thameslink 10.02 train to London Blackfriars on a Saturday. It was the first poem I’d ever read that profoundly impacted the way that I view the world. I felt that it perfectly encapsulated that feeling of sitting alone in a train carriage, and of the short-lived community formed by public transport.
I suppose the same could be said about a bus or a plane, but there is something about the strange liminal state of a train journey that I’ve noticed is a beautiful distillation of the human experience. For an hour, maybe two, we sit in a carriage alongside complete strangers, sometimes without saying a word, sometimes swapping whistlestop tours of one another. Either way we sit there as unknown characters in the story of each other's lives and trust that for that short time we will co-exist together, peacefully.
I’m not naive, I know that peace isn’t guaranteed and that sometimes those unspoken rules aren’t followed. I have experienced uncomfortable train rides, times where you're forced to remember that public transport inherently means the services can be accessed by anyone. Sometimes a train becomes a perfectly contained environment for violation and violence, those strangers can fast turn into predators.
But, it was also on one of these Saturday trains that I discovered Metro Rush Hour Crush.
If you’re one of my friends you have probably experienced, at some point or other, me rooting around a Metro Newspaper followed by a recitation of each person's small, wistful segment that ends in ‘Coffee?’. For those of you who haven’t had the joy of someone excitedly blabbering on about the lady that Mark, on the Bakerloo line, wished he’d given his number to last Tuesday, then let me explain.
Rush Hour Crush is a daily column that has been running for about 20 years and is essentially the modern commuters “missed connections” column. Readers write in an anonymous love note with a brief description of their crush - who they’ve met on the train or the tube - with the hopes that aforementioned love interest will read the paper and recognise themselves. The messages are mostly sweet, funny, a bit desperate and occasionally quite weird; typically ending in a hope for a reunion and date. If by some miracle the reader does recognise themselves, they can get the writer's email from the newspaper.
For the average reader - e.g 15 year old me - the column offers brief, entertaining vignettes about London life and romance (or failed romance). And despite the long odds, the column offers a tiny glimmer of hope that a fleeting connection can turn into something real. In 20 years, Britain's travelling workforce has written into the beloved piece of commuting folklore over 29,200 times. Due to its irritating anonymity (or charming mystery, who can say?) I can’t get any more real statistics, but I can confidently say that due to certain readers writing into the paper years later, Rush Hour Crush has resulted in 3 confirmed marriages and 4 children!
Hugh Grant’s portrayal of the Prime Minister opens Love Actually with the lines: “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere”.
Twenty three years on, these lines ring truer than ever. Though the front page of the Metro may scream out about hatred and greed, if you turn to page 11 you’ll find a daily spread of commuters and their latest crushes. I’d like to believe that there is more good in this world than not, and though it may take some rooting around to find, I’m sure that the statistics would agree with me.
Iona, what on earth was the point of this piece? I hear you ask. Well, I suppose to remind whoever reads it - myself included - that though it seems every other day that the world is about to go to shit, that maybe Laméris was completely right. Mostly we don’t want to harm each other. Mostly we want to sit on a train next to a stranger for an hour or two, and to peacefully share that small piece in our lives with them. Sometimes that stranger may even turn out to be the love of your life if The Metro is to be believed.