I’ve been commuting too long.  I know this because I have perfected the art of falling asleep in places that should not be humanly possible.  I have found myself drifting off standing up on the tube, going down an escalator and I can fit in 40 winks between single stops on the underground.  I am a long way from the days where I used to miss my stop on such a regular basis that my sisters kindly (?) created me a sign to put round my neck stating the station that I needed to be woken up at…

Today things went a bit far though.  I was trying to keep myself awake sensing that should I close my eyes I may fall into a coma and so I played the ‘what is the person next to me listening to on their i-pod?’ game.  This is where I award myself a pat on the back for each track I correctly identify based on the noise leaking from the earphones of the designated person.  It can be alternately rewarding and frustrating.  I had to lean over to hear one particular neighbours leaking a little better and (hopefully only a few seconds later) I woke to find that in my lurching forwards and sideways move, I’d managed to drift off and almost pinned the poor bloke to his seat.

Still, this is not as bad as one time when I had only just started commuting.  That was in the days that you had one, much coveted carriage that looked like first class but was second class and was made up of 4 seats facing another 4 seats.  Surprise, surprise, I’d drifted off to the land of nod and woke very slowly, loving British Rail for the provision of such very comfortable pillows.  It took a while to sink that it was unlikely that the company who had issues getting trains to run on time and in the right direction would suddenly have started providing bedding.  Especially as the blanket that I was grasping was so soft.  I could not stop stroking my cheek with it.  As I made my way through the fug of sleep to almost complete consciousness I realised that the people opposite were managing all expressions from smiling through to suppressed hysteria.  Around this point I realised that my pillow was the shoulder of the gentleman (a total stranger) that I had snuggled right into and the blanket was the lapel of his coat.  I squeaked a bit of a mortified apology.  To his credit, the lovely man told me not to worry and to ‘just make yourself comfortable and go back to sleep’…so I did.:o)

Sometimes you just have to sleep.