Strangers on a Train

This article will eventually get round to the nasty behaviour of two individuals on Twitter on Saturday evening. But first, I’ll explain why it seems to me to be interesting. Those of you who use Twitter, that strange form of communication, may have noticed that I refer to myself, there as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’. Amusingly, members of the Twitter mob (for that is all it is, an electronic mob) scold me for doing so.

 

If they had the sense of humour they always accuse me of not having, they might see that my use of the words was not wholly serious. But then again, I suppose they know little of history, propaganda or language. They don’t know that such phrases have actually been employed (quite seriously) in the newspapers, broadcasts and speeches of totalitarian states to describe deposed former rulers or other figures whom they wished to destroy or disparage. 

 

In my experience, when someone says that ‘x has no sense of humour’, it almost always means ‘x does not have the same sense of humour that I have’.

 

Now, I’m happy (for instance) not to share the sense of humour of the noisy football fan who, not long ago, wrecked my train journey by repeatedly (about every 45 seconds) cackling (in a surprisingly high-pitched way, for he was otherwise aggressively masculine), at his own jokes, joined by his companions, who may have been hoping that he would buy the next ten cans of Strongbow. Nothing else explains their exaggerated mirth.

 

There’s a strange belief, borne out by nothing, that laughter is necessarily a measure of happiness. In fact, if you don’t know the context, it is very hard to tell , in a  photograph of a laughing or weeping person, whether he is expressing woe or mirth.  It can be quite sinister (as when the emaciated, half-starved and tortured show-trial defendant's trousers fall round his ankes, in Costa Gavras's great but hard-to-find film'The Confession('L'Aveu')).

 

For many people, collective laughter (like that which so often greets the weary jests of Mayor Al Johnson at Tory rallies) is just a sign of belonging to a gang, and often of toadying subservience to the leader of that gang.

 

Listening to this can be a form of torture, if you’re not part of that gang, and not enraptured. I don’t like being part of any gang,  which is why I never watched ‘Yes, Minister’. Reading it, I find it quite funny and perceptive. But like a lot of people, I cannot bear canned laughter, telling me what I ought to think funny. Yet I know (and so do broadcasters) that others find canned mirth helpful to their enjoyment.  It is actually more interesting that some people like canned laughter, than that some people don’t. Perhaps this is another sign of the important distinction between introverts and extroverts, one of the deepest gulfs in human behaviour,  which is at last being discussed. For quite a lot of us introverts, your pleasure is our misery.

 

There is no balance here. Introvert pleasures, which tend (by their nature) to be private and quiet rather than noisy and publicly shared, cause no positive discomfort to anyone else. But crowds, spotting an outsider, are often displeased by his unwillingness to join in. In primitive societies, people like me are usually clubbed to death quite early on in our lives, having been marked down as outsiders, not to be trusted as members of The Gang or Tribe (This is more or less what happens in ‘Lord of the Flies’). We can only survive in quite complex civilisations. I'll leave it to you to decide if our increased chances of survival are a good thing. 

 

Conscious of this, I am quite careful to efface myself, my tastes and (above all) my plummy voice in certain circumstances. One of these is on evenings when my homebound train is taken over by large crowds of noisy football fans. There is, at present, no actual danger. But there isa sort of feeling that the normal rules don’t apply, and the sensible thing to do is to endure quietly until it is over. Don’t even try to enforce the rules in the quiet carriage ( an interesting reflection on our society is that there are always many fewer quiet carriages than there are noisy ones).

 

These people enjoy shouting, and loud tuneless singing, and when there are enough of them (and they tend to walk very heavily and aggressively up and down the train, to point out that they are now in charge) nobody can interfere with their pleasure, which is  probably a Human Right. Ticket validity takes a bit of a back seat, too. Very few ticket collectors come out of the little locked cubicles which are these days provided for them where the lavatories used to be, during these journeys.  Why would they come out? They’re not paid enough for such confrontations. I’m always filled with admiration for the few who do actually enforce the rules, men and women who could probably lead an infantry charge in battle.  I feel, too,  for the Buffet car staff, who just have to put up with it.  If things get seriously difficult, the train may stop for the Transport Police to get on. But all they do is apply collective punishment to the whole train, delaying hundreds of inoffensive passengers while they debate with the rowdies (in the knowledge that if they took any serious action, the CPS and the courts would let them down, a knowledge which the rowdies increasingly share).

 

Anyway, the other evening, it really wasn’t too bad. The football fans were shouting, and marching about, but there weren’t enough of them for critical mass and I had a pleasant journey, with a cup of tea and a biscuit, reading the vast acreage of the Saturday papers which I hadn’t got round to in the morning. How little I knew.

 

The following morning, I made one of my occasional checks on the Internet, which these days includes a dip into Twitter, This always reminds me of a long ago childhood boat-trip with a Devon fisherman, during a seaside holiday. Was it at Hope Cove, our favourite holiday spot of the time? I rather think so. He was visiting his lobster pots, a slow round in a rowing boat. Several were empty, but it was interesting and enjoyable (heartless as I then was) to haul one up to find an angry, clawed creature trapped within. 

 

And on Sunday morning, my Twitter lobster pots, often bulging with snappy comments remarking that  ‘Peter Hitchens is a ****’ or asking peevishly  ‘Why did the wrong Hitchens die?’  were not that full. Even the righteous crusaders, who seek to blame me for the measles outbreak, had gone quiet. They were not of course admitting that the NHS ‘MMR or nothing’ policy might have been at fault, but they were unable to counter my rather unanswerable point that this policy, if it was aimed at maximum immunisation, has demonstrably failed.

 

But what was this? A person, accompanying his post with what seemed to be a real name and a real photograph of a rather vain-looking, melodramatic person with a high collar and severe, swept-back hair (though for all I know it is a picture of someone else) , had written, around the time I was on my train:

 

‘I seem to be on the same train as Peter Hitchens. How many cheers do you think I’d get if I knocked him out mid-journey?’

 

There were a number of responses to this. One, from a person who also provided a picture of a smirking young man, which somehow seemed to me to have been taken in the back bedroom of his parents’ house, joined in with ‘Do something to his voice box. If you have a biro to hand that would be perfect’.  He used a pseudonym.

 

A couple of people had chided the original Tweeter, one saying he’d get more cheers if he threw himself on the tracks (Not very nice, but he’d raised the question of cheers and violence). Another said it wasn’t very heroic to threaten to assault a 60-year-old man ( 61, actually, but not yet wholly decrepit, all the same) . Then there was some discussion about how my putative assailant’s work might be affected, with him saying it was only an unpaid internship, so it didn’t matter.  

 

Well, I immediately got my Technical, Forensic and Legal Departments involved. So I have a screenshot of the original , and various other inquiries and actions are in train (sorry, no pun intended) . I also responded to the original Tweeter, asking him if it was an actual threat of violence, and if he had any idea of what he was saying.

 

Many hours later (It was a lovely Spring day) I checked back and found, not to my surprise, that my putative assailant’s bravado had melted into a lukewarm puddle. His swaggering Tweet had been deleted. He had sent messages claiming to have attempted to apologise to me, but I have not seen any sign of this. His whole account is now 'protected' which means I can't check back on this.  Nor has he responded to two messages from me asking if he has anything to say in his defence. The accompanying suggestion from the other person (in some ways even nastier, because so detailed, and because it was a direct and open incitement to severe violence against me), about the voicebox and the biro, was still on display.

 

 

Now, I disapprove of the police overreaction to some statements on Twitter, expressions of opinion and obviously unserious stuff born out of exasperation. And I am a forgiving person, if those who offend against me show any sign of genuine contrition. So I am as yet undecided as to how far I shall take this.

 

But I think that those who tell me off for describing myself light-heartedly as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’ might ask themselves a little about the extraordinary personalised loathing, mingled with assumed moral superiority,  which the self-righteous Left repeatedly express towards those who dissent from their view.  I ask them to imagine taking a peaceful train journey, and to find later that they had been sharing it with people thinking thoughts like these.