Hangover cure
The daily newspaper is de rigeur for many of my fellow train commuters. My reading attentions are more sporadically focussed on newsprint as it does have to attend its brief; even if that is the third day's evidence of scandal against someone you hoped would just dry up and blow away the first you heard of them.

I see some people chuck their papers in the bin and I think they miss the point. The newsprint media is meant to be shared. No one wants your old juice container or chewing gum but they will find a usefulness for the TV guide, the gig guide, the IT liftout, the job classifieds. I suppose they've not been in a situation where finding the bit of the paper you want on the train is a real bonus.

Between RAM with their freebie sampler from Stiff Records, and the music section of the Sunday Independent by Ray Purvis I got a hand up on my music tastes. He gave lipservice to the likes of Peter Frampton and Boz Scaggs but he also chose Kid by the Pretenders and Teenage Kicks by the Undertones as best singles of the year. Purvis also had a show of "new wave" music on 6NR, Shake Some Action, that I used to struggle bravely to listen to every Wednesday night from over two hundred miles away.