There’s a place for your backpack on the train – it’s not your back

If Dante’s journey through the underworld had been conducted on the London Underground, he would have reserved a special circle in hell for people who wear backpacks on a crowded Tube. And yet if such a depth of depravity did exist, I’m sure I would still somehow end up wedged behind one of these overladen individuals in much the same fashion as I was this week on the Victoria Line: someone’s boxy rucksack pinning me against a glass partition. And yet, gallingly, such obliviousness seems to go unchecked, drawing little more than tuts from miffed Londoners. These urban pack animals – easily identified by a combined lack of style and spatial awareness – are rivalled only by the much-detested door blockers (if it ain’t their stop, they ain’t moving) in the amount of hatred they inspire in the commuters around them.

One of the worst bits about being held hostage by a backpack on a crowded carriage is that you rarely find out what cargo was so important that it had to be carried at all times. What, to channel Brad Pitt’s character in Seven, is in the bag? Is it a backup gym outfit? A second, smaller bag? Perhaps it’s a miniature railway complete with regular industrial action? Whatever the reason, it takes rare if unwanted talent to move through the world in a way that is both frustratingly passive and unfailingly intrusive.

This felt like one of those weeks when the inconsiderate came out in force. A young man in Prada glasses sat next to me on the Piccadilly Line and proceeded to eat a serving of warm chicken, rice and eggs. And yet even this strange, apparently starved individual is more considerate than the gormless porters infernally annexing standing space in crammed carriages. 

Two solutions spring to mind. The first, since these people are evidently packed for a long journey already, is to tell them where they can get off. The second, and perhaps more practicable, is for these typically compact people who commute with the turning circle of a Cunard cruise ship to simply stow their bag at their feet. It’s a small gesture of civic goodwill but it would assure the rest of us that manners are not yet extinct – they are just, like much of the Underground these days, experiencing severe delays.