"A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many. I had not thought death had undone so many....each man fixed his eyes before his feet". This fragment from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland has stood firmly for years in my mind as the most concise description, as it is the most poignant summation too, of the trials of mass commuting. What I've long regarded as the deadliness of it all, it's unflagging dreariness. These lines have been steady companions when I've ridden the swells of people trooping from tube station to office and back. A Via Dolorosa, the undead caught in limbo between home....and wanting to go back home. An almost penitential slow shuffling passage of souls, but still they (we) march on.

Where this all falls down is that it's a cliched view, threadbare enough to see the light coming through the other side; few people willingly go to work just as few children yearn passionately for school, so to see all of this as a passage to purgatory, and lard it in sepulchral tones is really lazy and trite. By and large no one is regretful to go to work; what we are is indifferent, if anything we put up with it. A means to an end and no more.

Our common denominator, our shared commuter heritage, is that we walk the steps that our commuter forebears as we doubtless walk the route our successors will take. It's a continuum in that respect: what was, what is, and what will be. The infinity of commuting, we are timeless, another turn of the endless wheel. How very mystical in that particular sense, could almost be Eastern.

I know it's asking a lot here. I'm not advocating turning tube passes into fetish goods, or venerating the bus to work. Nevertheless, it's worth an explanation: how did all this come around? Like this: sometimes a maverick thought intrudes without knocking, and that's what happened this evening when I was at Waterloo station waiting for the Waterloo and City shuttle to pull in. For some inexplicable reason, the notion that what I was doing had been done by millions of others year after year after year wandered in. And I'm strangely glad that it has; somehow to feel part of something greater has taken the sting away of going into the office. I no longer feel part of the great undead slogging along Ludgate Hill. In it's own way, the walk to work is something as regular as the migration of Monarch butterflies, or the antelopes hurrying over the Serengeti plain...though I'll never be skipping and singing into the office.