Am I the only person who enjoys listening to other people’s phone conversations on the train?

Unappealing habit to ‘fess up to, I know. But let’s face it, anyone who chats on their mobile in a public place can’t be that bothered about privacy or they’d wait till they were out of earshot.

Back in my pre-commuting days, when I lived in London, I remember conducting a work conversation on a 38 Routemaster one morning, and after I’d finished the lady in front of me got up to leave and said, loudly, “This is not your office.” She had a point.

Obviously some conversations are more worth listening to than others. The “I’m on the train. Home in an hour” shorties don’t lend much to the imagination. But the, “He didn’t? He never? Well I hope you gave him what for!” type teaser certainly gets my mind going.

I’ll never forget a young, slender, wannabe model who used to catch the same train as me when I first moved to the coast six years ago. She would stand on the platform, in the shortest of short skirts, revealing the longest of long legs, hopping about awkwardly from one leg to another, like a young colt yet to grow into her body.

One morning she held a particularly loud conversation on a particularly quiet train, which began: “Smile? It’s so wide, it’s like I’ve got a coathanger in my mouth. And I’m walking like John Wayne… Nah, don’t think I’m gonna see him again. But you never know.” (There were many pairs of ears trained on that conversation that day, I can tell you.) The other morning, at the height of the snow chaos, we sit and wait outside London Bridge for half an hour for the backlog of trains to clear, and that’s when I overhear Pippa get a pasting. “She keeps sending out all these miserable, complaining emails,” whines my neighbour. “She’s not adding any value, Frankly, I’m sick of the sight of them in my inbox.”

If you’re out there, Pippa, watch out, because our friend’s certainly got it in for you. And right now he’s ringing round his colleagues canvassing opinion and rallying support. Don’t ask me what business they’re in — I didn’t get that much detail. Not that it’s any of my beeswax, although one of these days, I might just ask.

Names have been changed