See it. Say it. Sorted?

On one level we are all mentally ill. Where does culpability begin and end?

Trains have always featured in my life and remained for many years my preferred method of transport. I grew up on the edge of a wood near the Digswell viaduct which was built in the mid 19^th century for the great northern railway. As children we used to alternatively stand at the top and watch the trains whizz underneath us, or gather underneath the huge arches shouting and listening as the sound echoed back to us. My own children grew up opposite a train line which fed the Southern and Thameslink trains into London. Before he was 3 years old my eldest son would repeat the names of the stations along the line, so familiar was he with the announcements that could be heard both from the train as we travelled and from the platform straight into our house.

My father, having lost his local job during the recession in the 1980’s took the only job that came his way, maintenance work for the P&O Shipping company, which meant a 5am start, followed by a long commute each way. Instead of complaining, as many in his situation might have done, he wrote stories of the interesting people he met along the way. It was the late twentieth century, nobody had smartphones and people were still courteous. After a time he would read these stories aloud and we would marvel at the colourful characters, seen through the eyes of the most eccentric man on the train.

My husband recently took the sleeper train from Paris to Toulon and said that he hoped he was the weirdo in his cabin of 6. Fortunately for him, we think he was. There’s always one weirdo.

“The English eccentric is a social type who has almost completely disappeared in British society today”

argues catholic author and professor Sebastian Morello

“because you can only really have an eccentric in a highly communitarian society with such a sense of tacit, unexamined, and received truth norms about how people treat each other, about how they settle quarrels, negotiate, form bonds and friendships – none of which is regulated, but is instead an organic way of life. It is only within that system that people can negotiate how they are going to depart from those norms and however they do that is going to be constantly checked by others and by their desire to fit in to that social organism. Once you don’t have anything like a settled community or an organically developing society, something received, part of a heritage, an inheritance, a tradition – then all you have is everyone being an eccentric unto themselves”

And when everyone is an eccentric unto themselves, a tyranny is required to impose order from without. And this, over the relatively short span of my lifetime, is where we are at.

Over time, my experience, and that of my children’s, on trains has become increasingly unpleasant. Harassment, verbal abuse, aggression, drug use, lack of manners and physical harm.

Unsurprisingly, Last week a black man pulled his pants down on a busy London train one afternoon, exposing his penis, testicles and bare legs for all to see.