Image: Ian Capper

Last month, a certain lady on Twitter (whom I shall not name, to avoid causing her undue embarrassment—let’s call her Ms P—though if she is reading this, you know who you are) complained, on the aforementioned microblogging site, about the hourly semifast train service between Gatwick Airport and Reading, via Guildford, operated by First Great Western.

Ms P took exception to the “appalling 20mph” service which she described as “embarrassing” for foreign visitors, declaring it with a hashtag to be a “#3rdwrld” issue.

Now, of course, Ms P is perfectly entitled to her viewpoint. She is also entitled to exercise the right to share it.

But. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Naturally, the “appalling 20mph” service is actually a relatively reliable service on a line with a speed of 75mph. The train’s driver has to change ends at Redhill, reducing the train’s average speed to 42mph, which, considering the number of stops the train has to make, still makes for a reasonable Reading-Gatwick journey time of an hour and a quarter assuming no delays, and an hour and forty in Ms P’s case—a bit slower than the same journey by car, assuming perfect traffic, and that you have a car that you can stand up, go to the toilet and drink a coffee in whilst moving at 70mph on the M25.

FGW’s reliability has improved dramatically in recent years. The trains themselves are in the process of being refurbished. They provide plenty of luggage space. The train turns up on time, most of the time. It passes through the beautiful Surrey Hills en-route, providing an excellent view.

But the thing that irritates me, the thing that I found at the time—and still find—to be naïve and ill-considered, and borderline unpleasant, is that Ms P chose to describe it as third-world. One assumes (and hopes) that Ms P has seen footage of people in actual third-world countries, perhaps on Comic Relief or a similar telethon, or during advertisements for various charities.

Ms P’s complaints were that she was “rammed in like cattle” (waiting a short while for the next train to Redhill, and then changing for the next stopping train to Reading in around twenty minutes seemed to be out of the question) and that the train took an hour and forty minutes between Gatwick and Reading. These are not third-world issues. Relatively rich, relatively privileged commuters living in a warm house (one of which I am) deal with this every day.

One hopes that Ms P would guess that in a third-world country if there was one, the train would be dangerously old, packed more fully than she can dare to imagine (with people hanging from the sides to boot) and the stations, at both Reading and Gatwick, would be full of orphaned or labouring children, rampant with disease, paid pennies for hour upon hour of toil. These are third-world issues. Desperately poor people, packed amongst thousands upon thousands of others, deal with these conditions every day.

Hyperbole is a good thing, sometimes. So is having a good moan. They can be outrageously funny. Using an analogy to abject poverty, however, to complain about something as banal as a train journey you didn’t like, aside from being somewhat offensive to the staff who work their arses off daily to run the service, additionally comes off as crass, selfish, insensitive and tasteless considering what abject poverty is really like.

I shall now retreat, once more, to mope sarcastically at the state of our faltering, so-called “civilisation” of smelly little humans obsessed with Pokémon and Katie sodding Price.