Now I got a job, but I don't pay

I quite like commuting.

Before you start thinking that I have a weird thing about standing for hours on a platform watching train after train be cancelled, or being rammed into an out-dated train carriage and forced to stand with my face in the armpit of a man who smells like he spent the previous evening wrestling weasels on the floor of an illegal moonshine still, let me clarify.

The good point of commuting is the little bookends it offers at the beginning and end of each working day, a moment to get your head together and read, in the company of a multitude of bizarre passengers who you can surreptitiously peer at over the pages of the terribly intellectual book you're holding open in an attempt to make the less weird ones believe you are clever and interesting.

This morning however, a surprise awaited me upon boarding my train. I was in search of commuting gold - a completely empty four-seat section, you know, the kind where two seats face two others and if you get there first you can lay claim to the best leg room.

As I walked up the carriage my path was blocked by another man, clearly on the same hunt, and we pushed forward to the very front of the train, where we had to make do with opposite sides of the same booth.

I think my brain must have just registered the man as just another tired commuter in a suit and I looked up with only mild interest when he started fiddling with a device that I assume was a portable DVD player.

It was then that it struck me - this was no ordinary Jo Schmo commuter, but a chap I had known at school, who had even been in the same tutor group as me. He seemed deeply engrossed in the screen of his DVD device with a pair of blue earphones embedded in his ears and, as I confirmed with myself that this was definitely the chap who had tripped in a gravel-lined car park while on a school trip only to have us squirt the ensuing wound on his arm clean with a barrage from the barrels of our newly-acquired Supersoakers, I realised the full gravity of the situation.

The problem was an unusual one which I have only encountered a couple of times in the last few years - how do you instantly convert a relationship from school life to adulthood?

Now this chaps surname was Bettesworth, but as a result of the imaginative and humourous nature of odious Lynx-wearing, acned youths he was known as 'Betty'. At school there is always a complex social ladder, with the most popular at the top surrounded by the usual swarm of sycophants a couple of rungs below. Bettesworth, I think it is fair to say, occupied the lower rung of this ladder, along with the likes of Stinkey Sturmey and Chilly Chilvers.

Now looking back on it there was no reason for this - Bettesworth (even now I have the instinct to type 'Betty') was one of the nicest people you could even meet, but of course that is often reason enough for teenagers.

It is at this point that I could quite easily rewrite history and say that I gallantly braved the scorn of my contemporaries and stood up for Bettesworth when the spotlight was turned upon him by the crueler of my year. But truth be told I laughed along with the others. I was only one rung above him, having climbed from the bottom of the social ladder between middle school and secondary and, as is one of the unfortunate truths of life governed by the very laws of gravity itself, faeces falls down.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't steal his lunch money or push him down a well, and we got on pretty well. But sometimes you can be just as cruel purely by joining the pack in casually referring to someone every day as Betty, even if you have convinced yourself it is a light-hearted joke in which he shares.

So there it is, that was school and that is how it probably is for all generations, but now here I was today, sat on a train opposite 'Betty', both of us on our way to work in adult jobs, wearing adult clothes and living in an adult world.

A few months back Bettesworth added me as a friend on Facebook and I happily accepted, but now he was right there in front of me the actual prospect of having to engage in conversation seemed a lot less appealing.

Everyone knows those awful conversations with people you had never expected to see again.

"Soooo, how are you? What have you being doing these past ten years? Hasn't the weather suddenly changed?"

Then it would all descend into the depressing world of grown-up conversation, talking about credit crunches and mortgages and other things that make me want to pull my tongue out through my eyes. All it would take is one accidental look of acknowledgment and we would be riding the awkward train to destination 'we really must meet up for a drink some time.'

Then I realised something - he wasn't just naturally engrossed in his DVD player, he actually hadn't looked up from it at all in the last ten minutes. If a party of ninjas had chased a raptor onto the train Bettesworth would not have known about it until he was run through with a katana. He was pretending not to have seen me!

So there it was, we were going to be terribly British about the whole thing - both pretending we could not see a man sat facing us less than a metre away for an entire 40 minute train journey (this became particularly difficult when at one stage I picked up the strains of 'It's Raining Men' spilling out of his tinny earphones, best case scenario - being used ironically to soundtrack a comedy movie).

In the end it worked and I got off at Clapham Junction to seek out a more packed train where I could take refuge in the enclave of a stranger's armpit.

I'm sure there's a lesson here somewhere, but if there is I didn't spot it. Then again we don't have to learn from everything that happens do we?