A lot of people from Laois commute to work in Dublin every day. For most of those, it means getting the train. They’ll be familiar with some of these daily struggles.
- If you’re not in the train Station car park by 6.50am there won’t be a space
- The same 4×4 takes up two spaces every morning
- The majority of insane passengers get on/off the train in one of the stations in Kildare
- Every commuter is constantly tired. Work days are fuelled by coffee and bitterness
- Commuters fall into two main categories – people who think it’s ok to talk loudly in the mornings and normal people who hate them.
- It is normal and acceptable to day dream about killing that really annoying couple that talk every day and can be heard from three carriages away
- The appropriate response to seeing people kiss on a morning train is nausea.
- If the carriage is over half empty and you choose to sit in a seat beside somebody you don’t know you’re either a potential serial killer or from Kildare
- Watch out for school holidays as a gang of teachers will natter and gossip all the way to Dublin
- Around Electric Picnic time you will be amazed just how bad some people smell on their way TO the festival
- Some people will eat mackeral fillets covered in Garlic at 7am and not see it as a problem
- Those fold-up bikes that people bring on the train are neither cool nor practical and at some point you will fall
- People who run to and from the train may be slightly thinner but they aren’t happy
- If you grew up in the town you now commute from you will have at least one ex on the train
- If you go for just one drink after work, you generally end up drunk rushing for the last train
- If you miss that last train you are heading for the Green Bus. Nobody wants that
- Hard core lady commuters can apply some or all of the following on the trip: Hand Cream, Face Cream, Foundation, Eye Liner, Bronzer all while half asleep and on a train traveling 70mph and rocking as it goes. These are women not to mess with
- Any small talk on the train should be limited to complaining about the delays getting into Heuston, the weather, the lack of car parking spaces and the lunatics that get on in Kildare
- If the train pulls into Platform 8 in Heuston you may as well be walking from Naas
- Nobody has ever gotten onto the train at Cherry Orchard
If you like this, you’ll also enjoy Mark Doheny’s column last week when he wrote about Ballyfin College
Or our piece on the Brigidine Convent in Mountrath. Mark didn’t write that though. He didn’t go to a girls school.
