Observations from a late train

A few Mondays ago I had to catch a late train back into London. I’m not a huge fan of late evening trains, despite the fact that they’re far quieter than their daytime counterparts, thus affording more space and time to think. Late trains tend to be filled with a strange mix of characters – businessmen with ties undone after a punishing day, teenagers on their way to last orders or home from concerts, an alarmingly high number of single female travellers (which always amazes me), and the odd chap you think it might be best that you don’t make eye contact with. It’s the high degree of meeting someone in the final category that makes me slightly uncomfortable, especially if they happen to be swigging from a can of extra strong lager while travelling.

On this particular occasion, my fellow travellers on the 22.13 train from Leighton Buzzard to Euston were no different than any other late train I've caught, but I was relatively relieved that there was only one guy who could have been categorised into the latter category – a man with wild hair and a bandage wrapped around the outside of his trousers who infrequently stalked between the carriages muttering and growling to himself.

Taking my wife’s advice, I avoided listening to my iPod or talking into my mobile on the journey (quite who she thought I would be talking to at that time of night I do not know), and instead pulled out my work-provided Blackberry and caught up on some of the emails I hadn’t had a chance to respond to during the day. Of the three electronic gadgets at my disposal, I figured that losing my work emails was probably not a bad thing should some thug demand that I hand it over, relatively speaking.

So there I was, busily tapping out emails while the train – an all-station stopping service no less – slowly wended its way down to London, minding my own business and avoiding eye contact with anyone on the train. At Hemel Hempstead I feared the worst – waiting on the platform were three teenagers, two lads and one girl, probably of around 17, each swigging from bottles of beer, and when the doors opened they chose to sit in the bank of four chairs next to me, thus causing me to draw my bag closer to me and ensure that my iPod was not visible. However, when I heard their conversation I was quite surprised.

Guy #1 : Well, what you do is put down a 10% downpayment on the property and take a loan, called a mortgage, on the rest of the house value and pay a monthly payment back to the lender.

Girl : I don’t understand.

Guy #2 : It’s easy – you want to buy a £500,000 house, so you put down a deposit of £50,000 and then borrow £450,000 and pay the rest of it back over a long time period with a monthly payment.

I had expected them to be talking about whatever it is that we expect the youth of today to be talking about, like drugs, Pete Doherty and videogames, not finance decisions. ‘Hurrah!’ I inwardly exclaimed, ‘perhaps the media portrayal of Generation X-style errant youths let down by a struggling education system getting themselves into all sorts of trouble is just a myth.’ As a father-to-be, lately I have spent a considerable amount of time worrying about the way teenagers are these days and the things that – if you make the mistake of believing everything you read – teenagers get up to, worrying that my child will be forced to follow beastly (anti-)social norms.

Granted, they then proceeded to focus their conversation exclusively on which curry house they were going to go to in Watford and how drunk they intended to get later that week (‘ratted’ is the word they use these days apparently). So, illusions shattered, I carried on fretting about my unborn daughter while ploughing my way through meaningless email conversations.

What surprised me the most was the fact that when the trio got off at Watford they were replaced by two student guys who were discussing their respective overdraft limits and bank account interest rates, one expressing great concern at how little money – after rent and bills – he had to live on month-to-month. He claimed to have been living on a diet of bread for the past week because he simply didn’t have enough money to buy food.

It’s not intended to come across like schadenfreude, but I have to say that their serious focus on spending and personal finance rather impressed me. The bread-eating lad was genuinely concerned about the debt he was getting himself into and what he could do to take some of the pressure off himself. It did occur to me that there are probably many, many thousands of students in precisely the same predicament, who go from a life of carefree abandon while living out of their parents' pockets to suddenly having to balance their finances. They should call this Sudden Onset Maturity Syndrome.

These students also did not stay on the subject of personal finance for too long, and their conversation meandered quickly into how attractive so-and-so was and what a great figure someone else had. Once they got their hormones out of the way, they then started discussing the gig that they’d played that evening, and it transpired that the impoverished loaf muncher was a pianist and his accomplice a percussionist…in a jazz band.

I've read a lot about jazz and improv over the years, and always considered it not to be the counter-cultural revolutionary leftfield music of the reactionary sixties, but the domain of old men in silly hats and cardigans. I never thought it could have any sort of resonance with young people. And these cats (for we shall adopt jazz parlance in due deference) knew their stuff – they were namechecking the master of harmolodics Ornette Coleman, whose work was so bound into the avant-garde sixties that his music was the natural choice to soundtrack William S Burrough’s incendiary acid-novel-turned-film Naked Lunch. What’s more they were likening their tunes to Coleman’s hard to precisely define aesthetic. Most contemporary jazzhounds think that owning Bitches Brew marks them out as purist, but these two, not even yet in their twenties trotted out a comprehensive list of proper avant-garde. So enthusiastic did they become that they began vocalising one of their new compositions without instrument, the pianist mimicking the rolling, thundering and striding piano part of his latest song (a ballad he called it although it was hardly slow and sensual) while, after a couple of perfectly metered bars, his friend came in with a skipping little beat utilising nothing more than his tongue and thighs.

The whole hour journey down to London turned out not to be the depressing, long affair that it had the potential to be. Instead, it got me thinking about the modern youth and how the Daily Mail might just have it so incredibly wrong – kids aren’t all Burberry-scarfed, hoody-wearing chavs who couldn’t care less about morals and social norms. I appreciate that my sample of youth culture that night was particularly on the small side, but nevertheless it made me appreciate that kids aren’t all bad, and some of my fears for my soon-to-be-born daughter disappeared.

Unlike my slight concern about the man with the bandaged trouser who carried on making his way up and down the train even though we’d reached the final destination.