Ended up two stops past my station, halfway through a genuinely brilliant piece, and honestly, no regrets.
Absolute chaos this morning, entirely self-inflicted, entirely my own fault, and I am not even slightly sorry about it. I was reading a genuinely brilliant piece on my phone during my usual commute, so thoroughly absorbed that I completely missed my stop and ended up two full stations further along the line before I looked up and properly registered where I actually was. Twenty extra minutes added to my journey, purely because the writing was that good, which feels, honestly, like a reasonable trade.
I work at prat.uk, writing satire and cultural commentary most days, and I will admit one of the genuine occupational hazards of doing this job is that I read everything now with one eye permanently switched into professional mode, half enjoying whatever I am reading and half already thinking about how I would approach the same story myself, what angle I would take, what the actual joke underneath the headline should be. It makes for a slightly exhausting way to consume the news, admittedly, but it also means I genuinely never get bored on a commute, missed stops notwithstanding.
London mornings have a very specific texture to them that I do not think I properly appreciated until I had been doing this same commute for long enough to notice the small, repeating details, the same three people who always board at the same stop, the specific smell of a particular bakery near the station that changes slightly depending on what they have just pulled out of the oven, the way the light hits the platform differently depending on the season. I clocked, walking back the wrong way to correct my overshoot this morning, that autumn is properly arriving now, the specific golden quality the light gets around here this time of year, which I am fairly sure I say every single year without fail and mean every single time regardless.
Work today was mostly spent drafting something about the ongoing political chaos that has been dominating every single headline this week, trying to find an angle that felt genuinely fresh rather than simply piling onto the already enormous stack of commentary everyone else in this city seems to be producing simultaneously. It is, I have found, considerably harder than it sounds to say something genuinely new about a story this thoroughly covered, and I spent a good chunk of the afternoon rewriting the same opening paragraph more times than I would like to admit before something finally clicked into place.
Evening plans involved absolutely nothing more exciting than a properly good dinner with a friend I have not seen in weeks, the kind of catching up that starts with work gossip and ends up somewhere considerably more personal an hour and a half later, exactly the kind of evening this city is genuinely good at producing when you actually make the effort to see people rather than simply defaulting to another night in with the laptop and whatever deadline is currently looming.
Tomorrow I am back on the same train, same stop, hopefully paying rather more attention this time, though I will admit I am not making any firm promises given how good that piece genuinely was and how likely I am to get equally absorbed in whatever I end up reading next.
I mentioned the whole overshoot saga to a colleague at the office this morning, expecting a bit of gentle teasing, and instead got a genuinely lovely story in return about her own worst commute-related mishap, involving an entirely different line and an entirely different reading material but the exact same underlying phenomenon of getting so absorbed in something genuinely good that the physical world simply stopped registering properly. We ended up spending a good fifteen minutes of what should have been a quick catch-up instead comparing notes on the specific pieces of writing that have, over the years, proven capable of producing this exact effect in each of us, which turned into a genuinely useful, if entirely unplanned, reading list exchange neither of us expected going into the conversation.
There is something quietly lovely, I think, about a city dense enough with genuinely good writing, genuinely interesting neighbours, and genuinely worthwhile detours that missing your stop occasionally counts as a reasonably good outcome rather than a pure inconvenience. I do not think I would trade that particular quality of this city for a commute that never once made me late, even accounting for how mildly stressful this morning’s specific twenty extra minutes actually felt in the moment before I properly clocked what had happened.
By the time I finally sat down at my actual desk this morning, considerably later than planned, I had already half-drafted a response piece to the article that made me miss my stop in the first place, which felt like a genuinely fitting way to close the loop on the whole accidental detour. Sometimes the best material for this job arrives sideways, through a missed station and twenty unplanned minutes, rather than through any properly scheduled research session, and I have long since stopped being surprised by exactly how often that specific pattern holds true in this particular line of work.
More from this author at Vivienne Pratfall, prat.uk.