I won’t bore you with all the usual guff about Microsoft password Help being based in New Zealand, and access to a piece of hardware one bought in all good faith in a French supermarket being blocked by a software company that had nothing to do with the sale. Suffice only to observe that this is like the clock in a car saying you can’t start the bloody engine until you’ve given the right password to the clock…whose sole USP as a clock is that it always gets the time wrong.

Oh no. That would be boring. So instead I’d like to write about something else. I’d like to write about passengers.

“Passengers” is one of those words in English that can mean many things; but the sense in which I mean it tonight is that of  the social context: ‘those who are coming along for the ride – as opposed to actually doing something to make locomotion possible in the first place…or indeed, even bothering to buy a ticket’.

The usual tabloid definition of such passengers is that of the drunken Glaswegian in the string vest, and/or the Seven Kids by Seven Fathers single mother archetype so beloved of the Daily Mail. Such people do exist, but my definition of socio-cultural passengers is much broader…and infinitely more eclectic.

For example, on my building team at the minute, there are seven blokes and two women paying full fare, and one fat cockney braindead misogynist idiot who not only got on without paying: he’s also spending most of his time annoying the other passengers by telling them them they’re in the wrong part of the train, and facing the wrong way.

But looked at on a more macro basis, I could give you the following list of passenger-citizens who are in the way of every attempt to make society less stressful and more fulfilling:

* The one who shouts at injustice, but is appalled by the measures necessary to obliterate it.;

* The one who hires an army of tax accountants to avoid paying a fair share of tax, but rants about people on Welfare.

* The one who tells us to chill out, but is nowhere to be seen when the deadline has been missed….and the contract lost.

* The one who is driven by the need to destabilise the elected Government, but lacks the balls to stand for election.

* The one who claims the skills and capacity to fulfil a task, but then runs away from the consequnces of such falsehoods.

* The one who insists that everyone is equally deserving, but then spends an inordinate amount of time telling us how many people are scum, fascists, war criminals etc etc.

Place your own pet Double-standarder here.

On further reflection, perhaps passenger is the wrong term. Maybe I should’ve written ‘fare-dodger’.