“Hell is other people” wrote John Paul Satre, with sweeping Gallic flair. I think that had he been English, he would have restricted his scope to “Hell is other people’s children”, a more suitably anglo-saxon small-minded sentiment.
I am writing this on the train returning from Dublin, whose easy manners and raffish charm invited 800 years of extreme English vexation. At the moment I’m sitting in the “Quiet” carriage of a Virgin train. The "Quiet" carriage is nothing short of the embodiment of a coiled irritation, just waiting for a reason to snap. It magnifies any normal annoyance into being “against the rules”. It takes the notion of consideration and turns it into expectation, it gives us greater justification to resent each other.
The traditional Victorian English hatred of childhood rose to the surface on this occasion, causing one triumphantly childless couple to exercise their indignation on those who had inflicted the next generation upon them.
I am on my own today - the kids are at home, so I count myself amongst those vulnerable to infection from the grumpiness.
I’m not sure that is quite what JPS meant with his phrase, but very often things boil down to just these kind of petty irritants. But just in the way that the “Quiet Carriage” sets itself up for all manner of infringements, so often does our own private bubble of indignation. I think it usually turns out that we provide the Hell and we populate it with other people.
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