Commuting - It's not all bad... (If you look hard enough)

If you can't find the humour here you need to re-think your life...

I have always maintained that comedy is everywhere if you are looking for it.

Most people would find getting the 6.41 train anything but funny, and that may just play a significant part in why I find a perverse enjoyment from the journey.

Human behaviour is bizarre and wonderful at the best of times, but put them on a train at stupid o'clock in the morning and frankly it gets even stranger.

Today's observations included, but were not restricted to:

• The three musketeers: Three men, sat one in front of the other, all aged between 30 and 40 at a guess, all asleep, and all with hugely unpleasant expressions on their face. I can only imagine they were all having the same bad dream, because they looked in sync in their misery
• One up - All up: There seems to be an inherent belief among commuters that everyone else knows something that you don't. So when one person rises from their seat for no apparent reason, at least two or three more people seem magnetically charged to do exactly the same. This was particularly strange on the Waterloo and City Line this morning, it's a one stop train, we hadn't been going for very long when one guy inexplicably stood up, and two people followed him to stand waiting at the door… for most of the journey.
• Hats on the Underground: I'll qualify this by saying two things; hats on a busy tube are rarely a good idea, and the style of baseball cap with a wide, flat brim looks ridiculous anyway. As I got on to the Central Line this morning I immediately noticed the two young guys standing next to each other with matching cotton jogging bottoms on, it was a funny enough site at this point, before the one wearing the hat looked up sharply and jabbed his mate in the eye with his hat-brim, he (and most other people who saw) thought this was hilarious, his mate now probably has a similar attitude to hats as me, as well as a sore eye. 
• Selling a dummy and the Jack Nowell of ticket barriers: The one thing you can usually say for rush-hour commuters, is there is a directness in their walking that lacks in touristy types and half-term travellers. This morning there was one chap at Bank station who blew this out of the water. Walking quickly, straight and true towards the Waterloo and City Line, he suddenly veered across my path in the other direction, completely fooling the woman who was walking with him. She took at least three steps in what was clearly the wrong direction before noticing he was gone. This was all preceded by a man approaching the left hand ticket barrier of about 10, noticing a bottle-neck was occurring, dived across five barriers and on-coming traffic, before finding a gap to head into, much like Jack Nowell, the England winger who isn't all the keen on staying on the wing…

I haven't even got started on the hilarity that is queuing for trains, or the fact that 'mind the doors' is heard as a challenge rather than a warning.