The Norm Chronicles (23 page)

Then he noticed: a wide, bright, red-and-white striped sweatband with a (badly) stitched-on smiley, looking at him, half-way up her forearm.

Norm was a man of the mind.
Four-inch sweatband
. He went through life preoccupied, tolerant, rational and relaxed …
red-and-white striped
… though open-minded, naturally, about personal enrichment via others’ experience …
stitched-on smiley
… and believed each to their own, live and let live, John Stuart Mill etc. …
half-way up!

His eye caught the emergency hammer. He sank in his seat at the thought of hours of ‘chat’ with a four-inch, red-and-white sweatband and stitched-on smiley
half-way up
the kind of forearm that took its pleasures – he didn’t doubt – tearing off testicles.

Thinking fast, he took a firm grip on his emotions and began to calculate the risks. 1: Assume successful avoidance of eye contact; 2: Combine low-to-moderate chat hazard with 3: significant threat of, if not
spontaneous psycho violence then at least embarrassment-grade nutterness; plus 4: (he winced, but there it was) probable class and diction issues – Glaswegian? – and arrived at a 51 per cent probability of hell. Approximately.

She reached into her rucksack and pulled out … what?

52 per cent, thought Norm.

A large, red, paper napkin that she unfolded onto the table …

54 per cent.

… spread well onto Norm’s side …

58 per cent.

reached down again, paused, and placed one-by-one on the napkin: an all-day-breakfast mixed-triple-pack sandwich of egg mayo, spicy sausage, and bacon and tomato …

68 per cent.

a small pork pie …

75 per cent.

crisps, a Ripple, Crunchie and Mint Aero …

82 per cent.

and a can of Strongbow.

95 per cent.

Norm whimpered.

She rotated the Ripple 180 degrees.

99 per cent. Holy shit.

Norm was a dead man. Paralysed. Waiting for the cobra to strike. Surveillance blown, he stared floodlights. The only option was to get off at Crewe. Was ever a woman of more menace? Every move ended with a pause – and another smile. Every smile ratcheted Norm’s unblinking terror.

She picked up the can, stared at the label, smiled and pulled the ring.

It hissed.

She paused.

She tore it back – and set the can carefully beside the Crunchie with her right hand –
sweatband half-way up
. She paused.
Stitched-on smiley.
She lifted the can and drank, deep and long. He watched her throat’s gristly dance. She put down the can, paused and smiled.

Please, he thought regarding the pork pie, let her not spit. Then a more awful thought crossed his mind: what if she offered …

She caught his gaze and tilted the can with a quizzical eyebrow. Oh God.

Please don’t say
swig,
thought Norm. ‘Erm, thank you, thanks. I won’t actually. Just had breakfast, big one, already, really, coffee, tea … orange juice, coffee, honestly. Already. Thanks.’

She nodded, and turned to face the man who had sat next to Norm, hidden but for his fingertips, behind the
Financial Times
.

‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said in cut-glass English, ‘it’s probably a weakness of demand, at least in part, don’t you think? A dab of Keynesian stimulus wouldn’t be out of order. The economy, young man. Well, you can tell by the data on corporate investment that it’s as flat on its back as a tart.’
*

The
Financial Times
snapped straight.

She smiled and looked down at the table-top, placed her palms either side of her selection, studied it, picked the Crunchie, unwrapped it with delicacy, raised it to one nostril and inhaled. She moved the Crunchie towards the side of her mouth, closed her eyes and then, as if amplified, pulverised the end between her molars.

She sat back, opened her eyes and crunched, like a laird pacing the long gravel drive of his estate, and smiled again into the middle distance.

WHAT’S HAPPENED TO NORM
? The rational paragon just became a mouse. There he was, nicely archetypal, come over all paranoid because of a wristband, an accent and a pork pie in his personal space. Has he lost the plot? Well, yes. But then, we do. People are as inconsistent about danger as other things – often for good reason.

They may, for example, lose their nerve. John Sergeant was a BBC correspondent who covered conflicts including Vietnam and Northern Ireland. Then he was taken hostage in Cyprus and held at gunpoint for 33 hours. After that, he said, he didn’t want to do it any more. He
realised that he was ‘extremely frightened’ and went into reporting politics.

Something similar happened to David Shukman. He’d reported from war zones for 15 years. One day, asked to board a clapped-out helicopter from Tadjikistan to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 – he refused. And that was that. The more he reflected on his assignments, the more nervous he felt. He also thought more about the price paid by his family.
*

Stories allow people freedom to change. Probabilities could be taken to suggest that people should stay the same as long as the numbers stay the same. And one response to people who change their minds is to say that it proves we can’t judge danger sensibly. For it’s not as if the outside world has changed, as if train travel for Norm is more dangerous now, or war reporting – or war – wasn’t dangerous enough before. In terms of probabilities, the risks to Norm are the same before and after the pork pie. All the change is on the inside.

There are two simple justifications. The first is new information (see also
Chapter 14
, on chance, about epistemic uncertainty). Norm learned something about the risks of train travel that he hadn’t known or experienced before. Doctors, governments, the Health and Safety Executive also all revise their advice about risk as they learn. But true risk – whatever that might be – is unknowable, since our understanding can always be bettered. Always lay your sleeping baby face down, they said with confidence, until the evidence changed 180 degrees. ‘If the facts change, I change my mind’, said the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the facts about risk are seldom final.

The second justification for changing your mind is that you see danger in a new light, like David Shukman when he thought more about the pain his family felt, or as Norm does when his prejudices are stirred.

So to expect lifelong consistency from Norm would be inconsistent: it’s not normal. Norm’s basic approach to life – that reason and
calculation are the one true way – will survive, you’ll be glad to know, but perhaps with more sense of his own ups, downs and weaknesses. All the same, he has taken a knock.

But he would still want facts about the quantifiable risks of travelling, and here they are, first by train. Roads and air follow.

The hazards began – badly – on 15 September 1830, with the opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway. William Huskisson, a leading English politician, went to greet the Duke of Wellington at his carriage and was flattened by George Stephenson’s
Rocket
coming up the other track. His leg was ‘horribly mangled’, and he died a few hours later. Oddly, his death attracted huge and welcome publicity to the railway. This lesson – that it is safer to be inside a train looking out than outside looking in – is still valuable.

With qualifications: the inside of a train is also a public space. Of itself, the presence of other people – wristbands included – has only the tiniest effect on your chance of death or injury. Norm’s personal space invasion makes him quake, but with no basis in mortality statistics – murders on trains are a good plot device but extremely rare, although a man was jailed for life in 2006 for the murder of a student on a Virgin Express from Carlisle to Devon who did no more than catch the man’s eye: ‘What the f… are you looking at? I’ll stab you in a minute’, which he did, with an 11cm kitchen knife.
¹

For lesser violence, the risk is also real and also small. A stranger on a train might thump or abuse you, and 3,300 assaults were recorded on trains in the UK in 2010. Even so, this is 1 in 400,000 journeys, and so if you travelled every day on a train you might expect to be assaulted once around every 1,000 years, if the risk were equally shared.

Still, this is little comfort to Norm, who might fear that this is his thousand-year reckoning. Or maybe prejudice distorts his sense of the odds. There are no statistics for ‘class and diction issues’, as Norm puts it, or other awkwardness like bad language, noise, being pestered or leered at, or the smell of someone’s burger. But these things happen. So is it this – unpleasantness rather than physical injury – that people are really worried about when they say they feel unsafe on public transport? Is background irritation part of what makes the company of
strangers menacing, even when the risk of violence is remote? Norm is afraid because he can’t predict wristband’s behaviour – ‘pyscho violence’ or ‘embarrassment-grade nutterness?’ – and we feel more wary of strangers than friends or relatives on the back seat, depending on who your friends and relatives are. As one research paper put it: ‘feelings of anxiety and psychological factors act to make some people feel uncomfortable on public transport and […] this acts to increase perceptions of poor personal safety.’
²

Other influential factors were gender – women tend to be more anxious than men – and ‘the actual experience of a personal safety incident’. Mind you, even the most pronounced of these influences was found only to tinker at the edges of what makes most difference of all to how we feel, and that is the accident record itself. So the numbers do matter.

So, more numbers. Despite William Huskisson’s misfortune, train travel grew massively in the subsequent 180 years. In Great Britain in 2010 there were 1,400 million journeys, up from 800 million 30 years ago: that’s 4 million journeys a day, totalling 54 billion kilometres over the year.
³
This means that each one of 60 million people does on average 900 km (560 miles) a year, or around 10 miles a week, although this is one of those wonderfully misleading ‘averages’ that reflects the experience of nobody. Who travels 10 miles a week by train? There is huge variability, ranging from the dedicated commuter to someone in the countryside, cut off from trains by the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, to whom a train trip is a rare treat (or not).

At the bottom of this distribution will be sufferers from ‘siderodromophobia’, the inordinate fear of trains, but most people feel a reassuring solidity and familiarity about train travel, as does Norm, usually. And with good reason – it is extraordinarily safe to be a passenger on a British train. There were no fatalities in rail accidents for on-board passengers in 2010, nor in the preceding three years. Eight passengers were killed in stations: an elderly man falling down an escalator, four people falling off platforms when intoxicated, and so on. This is a rate of one death per 170 million passenger journeys, and even then does not reflect the experience of the typical passenger.

Just because there have recently been zero deaths in rail accidents
does not mean the future risk is zero, and we can fit a smooth trend to past data,
⁴
which suggests the risk has been dropping at around 6 per cent per year and is now expected to be 1.6 fatalities per year. This corresponds to 33,750 km (20,000 miles) per MicroMort. The Rail Safety and Standards Board uses a slightly different method and claims around 7,500 miles per MicroMort, around 30 times safer than a car per mile.

People do fall over on platforms, but the 240 major injuries recorded in 2010 work out at less than one for each 5 million journeys: the accident rate is higher at off-peak times, when users may be less familiar with the system, or drunk, or both. Maybe that’s their fault. Though a guard on a train was jailed for five years in 2012 after signalling for the train to leave while a young girl leaned drunkenly against it. She fell between the carriage and the platform and was crushed.
⁵

How does the UK compare with other countries? From 2004 to 2009 it had the lowest fatality rates in the EU except for Sweden and Luxembourg (which has only 170 miles of rail).
⁶
In contrast, 200 people were killed in just three accidents in 2010 on Indian Railways, although they do carry over 30 million passengers a day. But the UK has had its own share of spectacular disasters on the way to safer train travel, such as a triple collision at Harrow and Wealdstone in 1952 which led to 112 deaths. After the Second World War the number of passenger deaths regularly exceeded 50 per year, while around 200 railway workers were also killed each year: in 2010 the number of workers killed was 1.

But as Huskisson found out, a moving train can be lethal if you are not in it: 239 people were killed by, rather than on, British trains in 2010. These were mainly suicides and suspected suicides, but 31 were crossing the line at a legal or illegal place, about half the usual figure. The number of non-passengers killed has not improved: it was almost exactly the same in 1952, when 245 died. The number of suicides has also been amazingly constant, varying between 189 and 233 in the last ten years. Quetelet would have understood.

In Victorian days a train crash with a few fatalities might only have made the inside pages of a newspaper. Now the image of a derailed train would have massive coverage. It is clear that just counting the bodies fails to measure public interest and concern at a ‘disaster’. One accident
that kills, say, 10 people gets far more attention than 10 accidents that kill 1 each. The 250 people each year who die on the track usually have little publicity, but imagine if they all occurred at once …

That’s a problem if you’re deciding whether to spend money on safety, where the government uses the concept of the Value of a Statistical Life (VOSL) (or Value for Preventing a Fatality – VPF). As described in
Chapter 1
, this currently stands at around £1.6 million, corresponding to £1.60 to avoid a MicroMort. But the calculation falls apart if lives lost in a group are somehow worth more than lives lost individually. So a multiplier can be used that ‘up-weights’ lives lost in a ‘disaster’ to reflect public concern.