Quiet is the New Smoking

I can moan for a very long time about Virgin trains, specifically the trains Virgin use for their “replacement Inter-City” service rather than the company in itself. The chairs are too rigid, the arm-rest by the window doesn’t raise so you can’t curl up and sleep, and those massive toilets with the disconcerting electronic lock that somehow make the entire carriage stink of disinfectant.

But they have got one thing right – the Quiet Zone carriage. Oh, how I love the Quiet Zone. Such a remarkably good idea – a place where the misanthropic can escape the endless turmoil of society’s seeming obsession with talking loudly about nothing. Until recently the Quiet Zone would occasionally be invaded by an illiterate moron who cannot comprehend the existence of an area where phonage is not permitted, but my journey down from Birmingham to Winchester on Monday was 100% quiet. Either I got very lucky or a sea change has happened. The Quiet Zone is now respected by society at large.

Now, you might be thinking that the Quiet Zone is relatively new creation brought about by the irritation of the mobile phone, but it’s not. It actually has a historical precedent in railway transportation. Younger readers may not believe this, but at one stage you could smoke on trains. There was a whole carriage dedicated to smoking. The seats were usually dirty, the air stagnant and the general ambiance rather off-putting, but beyond the advertised bonus of being able to smoke while trapped in a metal tube for hours there was a distinct advantage.

Ordinary people stayed the hell away.

From the platform they’d spy the empty seats on an otherwise crowded train and think their luck was in, but on entering the acrid smoke would hit them and they’d back off, taking their self-obsessed self-interested selfishness with them. Parents were the best – they’d drag their brood along the length of the train looking for that elusive four-seats-free booth and on entering our nirvana would loudly declaim it to their children as if we were lepers, before moving on only to discover all that lay ahead was first class so they had to struggle back though our midst with their tired brats and large arses. And we sat there with our expanse of empty seats smugly smiling to ourselves, safe in the knowledge that, for the period of this journey, we were free from such nonsense. Of course such wonders could never last and with the excuse of cleaning bills (like we cared!) the smoking carriage was banished, never to return.

Smokers have been demonised by right-thinking society as anti-social idiots passively spreading cancer with their filthy habit and, unlike the obese, having the audacity to look cool in the process, all of which is fairly justified, but belies the fact that other than the actual smoking thing, smokers are generally nice people to be with. Why this is, I’m not really sure, though I have some ideas which maybe I’ll try to articulate in a future post, but the fact remains that, ratio-wise, where smokers are gathered you’ll find more nice, easygoing people than elsewhere.

Now, the folk in the Quiet Zone of the train weren’t overtly friendly. Given the nature of the thing they’re pretty quiet and kept themselves to themselves, but it still felt like a home I hadn’t visited for a long time. Quiet Zone people – you are the new smokers. And that’s a huge compliment.