Off on a short holiday - trying out the trains, trams and buses of another country. See you in November... brrrr!
Have fun!

You know I spend a lot of time trying to convince people public trainsport is safe - and then this happens. Guardian 23 October 2007.

Yes, I know it wouldn't be news if it happened every day. If this level of violence, rained down on a defenceless elderly gentleman were not so extraordinary.

But how can Judge Kenneth Macrae say a custodial sentence 'would not protect the public'? Well what can protect us from violence?

Anyone want to bet that if Shah Chaudhury had been a judge, and not a 97-year-old great-grandfather, Stephen Gordon would be looking at a punishment considerably more significant than a three year community order.

I do hope psychiatric treatment works for Stephen Gordon. He clearly needs it. But why should we have to live in the hope it does - and pretty soon? The brave people who gave evidence have to hope so. Anyone travelling in South London must keep their fingers crossed. How dangerous does someone have to be before they go to prison or a secure, psychiatric hospital?

Ok, so the 'witch' is actually an assignment for this course I'm doing. And 'dead' means I've finished the latest 3,000 word, lovingly crafted tribute to everything I have learned on the analysis of this communication medium's text. In its narration, in its characters, in its visual metaphors - I have run the gammit of textural exploration and - yes, I have had very large glass of red wine to celebrate this afternoon!

So in honour of occasion, and my new found free time, I've picked out my top five train tunes. This is part one of my communting top twenty. In honour of my time spent on buses I will work on five of these next.

1. Asian Kung Fu Foundation - Blue Train
2. Folson City Blues - Johnny Cash
3. Mystery Train - Brian Setzer
4. Dark Train - Underworld
5. Train in Vain - The Clash

Enjoy! Thoughts welcome...

I don't know whether it was a great late film last night, a good night's sleep, or the fact it was serious brass monkey weather this morning but hu-bloody-rah, my running mojo is back.

Why do i never get bored of watching Grosse Point Blank? Great movie, great lines, fun quirky romantic plot, John Cusak, Dan Ackroyd, Minne Driver, Joan Cusak...great cameo, Joan Cusak, - oh and great, great music. So there I am, midnight, fleecy oversized pyjamas, munching peanut butter on toast in between singing along to The Clash and The Beat and generally having a great time.

And this morning. Maybe not a great run but four miles round without feeling like I was going to pass out was a huge improvement on last week. Then I couldn't get the breathing in sinc and my legs felt like jelly with rocks in it. This morning and it was slow but I didn't feel like death.

Mind you it was freezing. It was so cold it was run or feel that icing up pain in your legs.

Maybe i was inspired by some sunshine - ah, natural light. A beautiful autumn morning - all mists rising from the river, ducks foraging and no off-putting bruiser dogs pounding towards me. And, of course, I was Running to Rock today. I haven't listened to anything in this folder on the ipod fpr a while so it all sounds kind of fresh and a surprise. Old classics like The Blue Oyster Cult and The Flamin Groovies can really help you keep your rhythm by mile three. Queens of the Stone Age and Therapy? always make me smile.

I injured my ankle a month ago, falling off a kerb. It made a horrible crunching noise and was quite painful for about 20 minutes. It all kind of swelled up but came back together and stairs became less of a pain threshhold experience after a couple of weeks. I'm now religiously doing my achilles stretching exercises but whether I'll manage a 10k I'm due to run next Sunday without completely disgracing myself... we'll see.

No commuting today - having a day off to study and catch up on some sleep after a fortnight of spending my evenings and weekends writing and editing website copy for work. Of course, I can't possibly live without news and so I was pottering around the BBC site by 10am. So today it's goodbye Deborah Kerr .

I remember once saying I had wanted to be her when I was a young teenager... and the person I was talking to dismissed this idea. 'She plays simpering fools,' he said. I let it go because I was younger, completely unsure of myself and was probably half in love with him. That would figure; he was an idiot and it took me a long time to work out idiots are for laughing with or at, but are not serious propositions. And I think he meant it as a complement anyway. It's just he hadn't seen her best films... being an idiot.

She was a great actress and I think anyone whose seem the scene where she rolls through the surf with Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity will agree she she does 'passion' to a level probably described today as 'iconic' by at least a dozen unimaginative journalists. She was a great actress and who wouldn't want to star with Burt Lancaster, never mind Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra...

But I thought her best film was The Innocents and as Halloween approaches I urge everyone to track down a copy, curl up by the fire and enjoy the thrills of this gothic spine-tingler. It's a film adaptation of Henry James' ghost story, Turn of the Screw. The screenplay's by Truman Capote, just for added value.

The imagery is marvellous. Beetles crawling out of the mouths of statues, rotting flowers, rising mists, shimmering figures, knowing children... is the governess a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, hallucinating and amplifying her hysteria onto two innocent children? Are the children truly corrupted by the now-dead groom and his lover? Are they now wicked puppets, controlled from beyond the grave, and are the governess and the housekeeper The Innocents? It's delicious British spookiness at it's best and though I've seen it a dozen times it never bores me.

Deborah Kerr plays the governess with complete assurity. Beautiful, kind and caring, but blind to the brittleness of her charges and so obsessed with her pursuit of truth she fails to see what is gathering in the dark.

And if you can't find the film, read the book. That's bloody brilliant as well.

And I thought we had it bad before 8am and around 5pm...

I had to stop in at the hospital today for an appointment with ENT (I've got dickie ears) and so I didn't get to Oxford Road station till 11am. Having snapped up a £1 egg mayo sarnie from greggs I spent a pleasant 10 minutes sitting on a bench, musing at the possibilities of my ever getting done for rollerblading on the platform (a serious offence according to the lady on the announcing thing) while munching a seriously yummy sarnie and reading gratuitous gossip in the Metro.

Usually when I get on the train it's seamless bliss all the way to Bolton. No noise beyond the rustle of a newspaper. Certainly no mewling babies and overly chatty teenagers. The train was packed with bairns bawling from their pushchairs, parked right in front of the doors for maximum inconvenience to anyone getting on or off, and teenagers conducting endless calls from mobiles.

I'd like to make an addition to the announcement lady's script: 'Can I remind customers at Oxford Road there will be no cycling, rollerblading, crying, screaming and phone calls must be kept to a maximum of 180 seconds By order of the woman who may have dickie ears but is not stone bloody deaf - yet.'

Green issue thing - sorry, almost forgot you!

Of course my blog is devoted, or certainly inspired by commuting - on public transport.

When I got in tonight the Simpsons were on. Marge said to Homer as she found him in the lighthouse: 'Well I knew you must be on foot because you always say people who take public transport are losers,'

And you know, hero or not, sometimes Homer gets it wrong.

Homer spent that episode lost and alone. If he'd taken the bus, or the train, or the tram he wouldn't have been alone. You're never alone when you travel together. You're part of the herd. moving together, or stationary together, but you're together.

We're not losers and we're not alone and miserable in a tin box on the M60 either.

There isn't much to recommend Mondays. But Charlie Brooker is one of them.

Swaying homeward on the top deck of a 41 bus with my favourite Guardian columnist, listening to a random selection of tunes from the 'And Relax' folder of the ipod, almost makes Mondays in the office slip away. I rolled into Rusholme listening to Whole Lotta Love and smiled to read Mr Brooker's attempts to take on noisy neighbours.

Maybe it's being a woman, but I've never had any qualms about phoning the police myself. No blokey cool bravado to maintain, I guess. Many years ago I had the misfortune to live in the flat beneath this numpty whose midweek clubbing activities brought him home with the milkfloats. Everyone likes to listen to a few tunes when they get in. But midweek at 4am at full volume isn't going to endear you to a woman who has to get up for work on an evening newspaper, starting at 7.30am. I called the police on several occasions. And the sound of his toilet flushing fuiously two minutes after the copper's silhouette appeared in the door at least gave me the satisfaction of knowing it was getting very expensive, being a noisy, thoughtless git.

The Neil Young, by the way, is proving delightfully theraputic. It's just the ipod's on random select just now and I can't for the life of me remember how to get it off. So I go crashing from Mozart violin concertos to Neil Young to Led Zep. But even though it's Monday - that's ok.

I'm clearly having a weekend of wistful nostalgia.

No matter how old I get Sunday evenings still seem to be all about getting ready for the week ahead.

Instead of writing essays to Annie Nightingale and Alexis Corner I'm checking my work emails, clearing out any junk, making 'to do' lists and some notes for meetings.

I've ironed enough shirts to last the week. I've packed my gym kit, a flask of homemade soup for lunch and my shoes are clean.

But the best bit though is adding tunes to the ipod. This week I will be listening to Neil Young - Tonight's the Night and Sleeps with Angels and Jim White - Wrong-Eyed Jesus! No one is more surprised than me that I've come to love Neil Young's melancholic voice. And Jim White is touring just now - if you live near Oxford, Brum or Brighton he's around this week. I've somehow developed a thing for lonesome tales of the America (or Canada in Neil Young's case).

About 10 years ago I was listening almost exclusively to dance music, 10 years before that some heady mixture of The Smiths and The Stranglers. Ten years before that... actually, I was crazy about a song called Radar Love by some band called Golden Earring. I think they were Dutch. And it still sounds fantastic today. And yep, it's on the ipod.

My weekly Top Tunes are a marvellous antidote to the tea-time bus noise. Which sounds better to you? Twittering students and maundering babies or travelling cacooned with a Guardian in your own sound-tracked journey? Go on, treat yourself. Commuting will soon seem strangely empty without one.

Remember your glee at being able to sit on the top seats of the bus when you were a kid?

Climbing those stairs, desperate to sit at the very front. I remember a bus ride out to Hook Norton to my best friend's and squealing with laughter as branches bashed against the roof while the bus thundered down country roads.

These days sitting at the front of the bus is more like an urban horror flick; a slow-motion action sequence giving you a panoramic view of one near crash after another. If it's not idiots edging out from sideroads it's cyclists pitting their wits against your bus and the others jostling for position at the Rusholme traffic lights.

But if that's one moment of childhood stolen by the stark reality of adulthood; here's another. Some git has modernised Pinky and Perky.

I don't know what design software programmes they use days, AutoSatanCAD for the Truly Evil maybe. Look at those pigs. Do they look placid? Do they look like you could sing along to their squeeky, helium-fuelled voices? Where has the camp yellow shirt and little neck tie gone?

These new-look doughy little monsters look like they are possessed by the Devil himself.

And someone is quoted as being very excited about the 'brand'. Pinky and Perky is now a 'brand'? Has the world gone mad? Is it just me? Am I having an Emperor's New Clothes moment?

Sometimes modern life is bloody rubbish.

Talk about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness... As they say in all the Jack the Ripper movies, just before the lady with the ankle boots says 'ere darling I'll show you me thrupenny bits for a tanner'...

'blimey guv'nor it's a right pea-souper out there today'.

Happily perusing the movie gossip of the day in the Metro it was only when I looked up, outside Salford, this morning that I realised the world had disappeared.

This turned out to be wishful thinking. It all looked mysterious and interesting. In reality it was all there, waiting for me. I just couldn't see it coming.

In between five hours of meetings I moved offices today.

I've been temporarily parked in a windowless office with air con so fierce I was hallucinating penguins by the afternoon. It was like that film where one of those idiot blokes who climbs mountains without enough ropes/flares/kendal mint cake has to crawl back to civilisation without half his toes and 32 broken bones. In my corporate version I'm pounding away on a keyboard, sending coded signals to the admin teams down the valley to bring more tea and chocolate before I'm eaten alive by a passing polar bear... kind of.)

Anyway, I have escaped by arctic parallel universe/veal crate for a room with a view of a playground today. I'm not moving ever again.

Has someone taught them to drive like British pensioners?

About 18 months ago the 41 and 48 buses were, by the large, driven by a sudden influx of Polish dare devils who appeared to be channelling a 1950s film called Hell Drivers.

Anyone who knows this great piece of British cinema will recall tipper-truck drivers locked in kill-or-be-kill road races to deliver their loads. Patrick McGoohan played the vicious villain, Stanley Baker the boy out of gaol trying to make good. Herbert Lom's in it and it's worth a deck just to see Sid James in a straight role.

The bus home to Northenden wasn't quite that tense but blimey it was fast. Rattling down Palatine Road into Northenden was like a fairground ride and admittedly a big tough on the pensioners trying to stand up before they got off. But I could make it home for the Simpsons.

Now they drive just like anyone else. Coupled with the Owen's Park roadworks it's a wonder it isn't time for me to go back to work by the time I've got home for tea. I'll pass myself coming the other way one day.

Can someone print a warning on mobile phone cases which says something like this:
'You may be having a personal conversation but in a public place everyone, and we mean 'everyone' in a 10 metre radius who isn't stone deaf, can hear everything you are saying.

This afternoon on an incredibly pedestrian 43 bus back from town (Wilsmlow Road, not improving) I had the fun of listening to some nubile party queen explaining why she was having a quiet Saturday night in, in her hotel suite, with her cousin - because she was in mourning for her grandmother.

Give the girl some credit, she did seem to be conscious of the fact her gramdmother's death some two months ago was troubling her and the constant crying was not normal. She even seemed aware that 'partying hard' midweek wasn't a good thing and maybe the death of a friend 'who had a certain kind of a job, if you know what I mean' and had 'hung' herself might be troubling her.

I resisted the temptation to lean back and point out that, grammatically speaking her friend had, in fact, 'hanged' herself and only meat and animals are hung. Humans are hanged. Then I considered her friend's mysterious profession and if it was anything i could imagine then she probably did feel like a piece of meat and so she might have been right the first time.

Anyway, my passion for the English language leads me astray....

She carried on informing her friend that she's caught the 6.30am flight up from Cornwall was holed up in a suite at the Armarda ('I always book a suite, I know, but double bath and twin sinks and your like "yay"')and had spent the day shopping for t-shirts, pink boots (!?!?!?!?) and a handbag but had to stop partying because she'd drunk of bottle of wine, a bottle of JD, taken off all her clothes, thrown up and then gone to bed.

I am sure someone's thinking 'my kind of girl' but I'm thinking 'my kind of pathetic nightmare'. After having proclaimed her love for JD as 'her drink' she then polishes off the call by saying how she's been taking drink and drugs all week and had been doing drugs she hadn't done before and usually she was all 'in control' about taking drugs but this week she was just 'yeah give me it'. She then started rattling on about 'charlie', truly the loser's drug of choice.

I know you can't save people or rescue them, particularly as a stranger on a 43 bus, and I know losing people you love is hard. But destroying yourself helps no-one and nobody is going to thank you for turning yourself into a drunken self-obsessed idiot who doesn't stop to think how many people, including policemen, might be listening to your pathetic tale.

What is it about Friday that turns an evening train journey into the opening scenes of a teenage slasher movie?

Anytime between 7pm and 11.30pm and there are clutches of leary, tanked up lads on the platforms. Ok it's the weekend, but why do they head for the train station? On trains I've seen spaced out junkies smoking what was definitely not pot or fags and certainly did involve tin foil. I've been chatted up by lost boys young enough to be my children.

And where are the platform staff? Where are the ticket collectors?

I've developed high-level skills in watching what goes on in a carriage through its window's reflection, without catching anyone's eye. I comfort myself that if push did come to shove my kickboxing blue belt would stand me in good stead. And it may well be that women are far more at risk from violence at home than they ever are from strangers on a train.

But just because I pay an off-peak fare does that mean I have to accept a third-class service?

I work with a girl who has stopped going out with her friends after work becuase she finds the train journey home makes her too nervous.

And don't tell me a change in government could make the difference. That really is bollocks.

Right, when did this happen?

Bolton to Manchester train this evening and some bloke plonks himself down to me with an mp3 player that appears to be having an identity crisis; it thinks it's a mobile disco.

As we've established before, I'm not really bothered by mp3 player volume. I also understand not everyone shares my taste and, therefore, a great deal of people have poor taste. If not the sort of taste you find in the bottom of a wheelie bin that's not been collected for a fortnight.

But when did Pinky and Perky escape Watch With Mother and record a dance track? What the hell was that?

So, it's a train journey home and I'm deeply into my book. I'm sitting facing that bit where the bikes go when the train stops at Salford. People get on, man sits down in the seat in front of me. I'm consumed by murder in la Rue Morgue in Therese Raquin by Emile Zola (great read, but I digress...) when I glance up and nearly utter the lord's prayer, or at least a couple of expletives.

There before me is the man with the tattooed face. Completely. Like some maniac Maori with a set of tattooing crayons. And he's clearly into piercing too. Big metal polo-type earrings, eyebrow rings... you get the picture. Startling, to say the least.

So, now I've recovered from the shock I'm doing an appalling attempt at pretending to read while I gaze at the art. The bloke on the other side of the carriage goes one better, he decides to start a conversation. Fishing about in his pocket he pulls out a piece of jewellery that looks like a cufflink or something like that and says to Mr Tattoos 'Ere mate, you seen anything like this before?'

Valid question. Maybe he thought he's seen him previously on the Antiques Roadshow. Though he would have been heavily disguised, he was wearing filthy jeans and a fluorescent donkey jacket.

Mr Tattoos studies the silver object and then says; 'Dunno mate'.
The man with the mystery article sounds disappointed: 'It's just it's got Tiffanys written on it and that's a famous jewllery shop, isn't it?'
'Is it?' says the bemused Tattooed Man. 'I thought it was a night club.'

Now you don't hear that on the M60.

There is no denying music maketh the journey fly by... or at least appear to have a film score.

The James Taylor Quartet hammer-organing their way through The Man From Uncle theme; marvellous for night-time forays through west Didsbury. Brian Eno's Another Green World soothes anyone into an early-morning sonambulistic trek to the bus stop.

But whatever your fancy, you do think about the person next to you, don't you - never mind the woman sitting half way down the bus.

Now first thing in the morning, I don't really mind. I mean, whatever. Nothing has irritated me enough by 7am for me to be really be bothered by anything. You can recite shakespeare's sonnets aloud for all i care - all of them. What sounds like an electric razor accompanying bee playing a comb and tracing paper to some hideous handbag house anthem isn't going to bother me. I am even half hoping I will be getting on the same bus as The Music Man.

Sadly the Music Man has a megarider while my pass covers all buses, so I missed him this morning, but he brings joy to any day. Not only can you play What's That Tune? from half way down the bus, you can watch him groove along. I don't know if he realises anything beyond tapping your toe is so not cool, but he's always smiling as his shoulders dip and his arms start to sway. He's very keen on The Beach Boys and Queen. I am sure the novelty will eventually wear off, but for now he's caberet in an anorak.

I once upset a bloke on the back seat of a 43 when his portable CD player, together with its completely redundant headphones, suddenly started booming out. I made the mistake of looking up from my book, albeit to check we weren't about to be rammed by a mobile disco, only to unfortunately make eye contact with him. 'You bloody readers,' he said, before turning down what may as well have been a boom box. Yes, that's right, because turning a page is so noisy.

Of course my favourite inapproprate music moment on a bus was years ago. God so long ago walkman's were relatively new, about the size of a half brick and cost the equivalent of a week's wages. I was on a bus to Ashton-u-Lyne, it was dark, it could have been winter, it was certainly late. Some lass gets on the bus, sits on the back seat, puts on her walkman amd proceeds to sing along to Silver Lady by David Soul. So completely out of key was her wailing it was a miracle I hadn't wet myself before we'd got through Gorton, where she thankfully got off. Presumably to start her night-shift as neighbourhood cat scarer.