I'm not sure if I knew what it was before I heard the Devine Comedy track "Commuter Love" but I certainly didn't have the label. And it's not just love you can experience but a whole gamut of other emotions too.

In the song it is about a man who loves a woman he sees every day but he is too embarrassed by the situation to actually go and express his love to her. Some commentators might say it was a British trait thus neatly sidestepping the fact that Neil Hannon is Irish.

In fact the stereotype is so out of whack that most often you hear "distinctly un-British". This is so prevalent these days that being un-British must be the most actually British thing of all.

I myself feel love for my fellow commuters but not in the same way as the song. I don't feel attracted to any of them but instead I feel quite a paternal kind of love. If one of them is scruffily dressed all of a sudden I feel like they must be letting themselves down. And if some of them are too friskily dressed I feel the same feeling. They can do better I feel, I've seen them do better.

The particular example I'm thinking about is a woman who has been quite dressed in quite a dowdy dressed all winter. And then suddenly she was wearing a "boob tube" and short skirt which I initially thought could be explained by an erratic circulation system. Not wanting to be cold in the winter or hot in the summer. At least that was what I thought until I heard her say into her phone, "yeah, wish me good luck. I'm going to ask him for a raise today".