If there is ever a call for a Poet Laureate of commuting, I will have no hesitation in putting forward T.S. Eliot. A lanky, cerebral Mid-westerner from St Louis, who made London his home, rubbed his lamp, and out came two of the finest, most evocative, and certainly accurate pictures of commuting I've come across.

The first is from The Four Quartets: "When an underground train, in the tube stops too long between stations. And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence. And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen. Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about"

That's exactly what happens when a train pauses between stations; everything gradually winds down, the hubbub dwindles, whatever chatter there's been drops away, and we sit or stand, and think.

The other piece I have in mind is from his most well known work - The Wasteland. "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street".

This is how we are every morning, wrapped in our personal shroud of fog, flowing the way termites do out of the mound. Automatic footsteps, grey faced, robotic. The un-dead.