Stranger on a train

There are certain codes of conduct on public transport systems the world over that are pretty much the same. Basically, you sit still, keep to yourself and talk to nobody. This seems to be a somewhat relaxed rule on the Belair line; when no train is more than three carriages long, there's a tendency to get to know the people you're on the train with and I guess because it serves neighboring suburbs, there are some people who just know each other, see each other from time to time, and are quite happy to chat, out loud, on the train, without really giving a stuff or, actually, without feeling they're offending anyone by having a quick catch-up, as if they were sitting down for a 15 minute coffee break together. This is Adelaide (or this may just be the Belair line) and it's a big country town (Adelaide, not the Belair line), so you expect that. (And I just got a lot of people's backs up by calling it a big country town but I've lived in a small country town, a medium-sized country town, and a really big city, so I'm not making an uninformed judgment on the issue. In a big city, the no-talking-on-public-transport rule is much more strictly adhered to and anyone who transgresses gets a look from other passengers that says, quite unmistakeably, 'you're a fucking weirdo'.) What you don't often hear though is drivers breaking this rule. And I might digress here and point out that I find it strange the way drivers say the names of the stations the train is pulling into. They don't say, for example, 'Mitcham Station', they say 'Station Mitcham' or 'Station Goodwood'. I'm sure there should be some form of punctuation in there, say a comma or a colon (Which, if I can digress even further to something quite unrelated, C told me last night about an acquaintance of her family who found out he has colon cancer, then she told me his name was Colin and yes, I know, I really shouldn't have found it funny cos it's fucking cancer but, y'know... his name was Colin! Please don't judge me; it's the language I'm laughing at, not the cancer)... where was I?... yeah, there should be, if it were written down, some kind of dot or squiggle to mark the relationship of the adjective and noun, which is why I find it a strange way to say station names. [sound of me taking a deep breath] So this morning, as the train pulls in to Station Adelaide, and everyone gets up to queue at the door, so they can rush out and get on with the drudgery of their mid-winter, workaday lives, the driver says over the P.A.

Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. If you've decided you can't face the day, it's about 18 minutes till another train to take you back home again.

And everyone (well, some people) laughed. I didn't laugh; I just muttered something sarcastic but Sarcasm is my first language so if I were going to laugh I might as well do it in French (imagine me doing a very nasal-sounding 'hawhawhaw... eet ees vairy furny, non?') but I was sort of translating that sarcasm to a laugh in English on the inside and it didn't feel half bad.