Commutable: Will Harris

Turning into a vampire isn’t cool

I am about two and a half months into my new life as a commuter when I discover I have turned into a vampire. It is all so easy, at first. The novelty of the early starts, the extra time my train journey affords me for emailing, reading, catching up on my correspondence (although somehow never entirely catching up on whatever work deadline is looming over me this week). And outside, unparalleled views over the Sussex countryside, morning mist rising from the wheat-fields as we speed past, over the Ouse Valley Viaduct, rattling towards the city.
But with the unrelenting energy of a locomotive, the wheel of the year turns towards autumn, and then winter. Colour blazes in the fields and hedgerows, then dies, replaced by the dismal palette of lengthening nights and the first shards of frost biting at the carriage windows. And slowly but surely, deprived of the light, I become a creature of darkness.

Sunlight. It may be one of the basic requirements for life, but when your life involves a regular commute to a 9-5, it’s one of the first things you have to give up. From October to March, you have to resign yourself to the sky being an inky black when you leave the house and no lighter when you get home.
This presents a number of logistical problems, not least of which being how to conduct your ‘getting ready for work’ routine when your train leaves in half an hour and your partner is still fast asleep in bed. Or at least pretending to be, in the hope that you’ll stop clattering around and will eventually manage to exit through the bedroom door and not end up in the wardrobe. Wearing their shoes. Again.
On top of that, there’s the vampirism. The unending cycle from bed to train to office to train to bed (with maybe a pit-stop at John Lewis, if you’re lucky) means it’s easy for a commuter to end up deprived of UVA, pale of face and red of eye. I’m continually thirsty (you try drinking a cup of tea before a two-hour journey on a crowded train where leaving your seat to use the WC is tantamount to surrender). All I want to do is sleep through the day (to be fair, I’ve been battling that one since university). Plus I live in permanent fear that, unless I find some creative way to weave a gym membership into my new routine, my chest area will start to resemble Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Don’t be misled by my flippant tone. We’re not talking sexy, young-adult-approved vampires here. We’re not talking the captivating pallor or CGI sparkles of Robert Pattinson, Abercrombie-and-Fitch-does-the-undead. We’re not talking Buffy. When I look in the mirror, one of those who commute in the shadows, it is a death mask staring back at me, Max Schreck as Count Orlok. That’s not the worst of it. Pretty soon there might not be a reflection at all.