Commutable: Will Harris

The downside of living in a desirable destination

When you spend a large part of your working week riding the rails between Brighton and London, the last thing you want to do when the weekend rolls around is accommodate a visit from friends or family. Unfortunately, Brighton being one of the UK’s foremost tourist destinations, those of us who live here don’t always have a say in the matter.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy being social, and I like playing the host even more so. It gives me an excuse to buy nice wines, plus it’s generally the only time I can ever get Jack to help with the cleaning. But after five days of commuting, launching straight into the pressures of entertaining with no downtime in between can be challenging. On one hand, you want your guests to have a good time, and enjoy the full Brighton experience. On the other, you’d quite like them to clear off so you can put your sofa-bed to a more self-centred use, like sleeping for 36 hours straight without anyone once suggesting a trip round the Royal Pavilion.

This antisocial impulse may be appealing, but it’s not without its disadvantages. At a time when a commuter’s life can feel increasingly dominated by the spheres of ‘Office’ and ‘Train’, the last thing anyone would be advised to do is to limit the one marked ‘Friends’. So you prop your eyes open with matchsticks (or whatever the 21st century equivalent is, now that no one smokes cigarettes or builds campfires anymore) and force yourself to struggle through it, smiling, joking and wishing you were dead. Or at the very least, asleep.
Case in point. My first week back at work after the Christmas break was a real slog, half caused by the long nights and half by the frequent disappointment that I was in an office rather than in my pyjamas eating Quality Street with abandon. What I needed as I finally dragged myself to the end of the week was a restful weekend, but what I got instead was two days playing tour guide for a group of Jack’s friends who had decided to sweep away their January blues with an impromptu trip to the seaside.

Which is not to say it wasn’t fun, as we scampered from bar to restaurant to the penny slots on the pier. But behind it all was the knowledge that, come Monday morning, my train to St Pancras would be waiting for me at the same time as always, and that – rather than restoring my energy levels to normal – the end of the weekend would leave me more tired than when it began.
There was one upside though. As they left, one of Jack’s friends remarked he’d had such a good time that how could he not return the favour by inviting us to stay with him in Bath the following weekend.
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Jack said to me later. “Do you mind if I go?”
I can honestly say that I don’t.