Where is Rowena?

I don't think you have any idea who I am as we were out of each other's eyesight for the duration of the journey, which, thanks to you, felt longer and more arduous than any I have ever taken. If you did see me, I was probably making this face:

Why am I so angry with you, Mr Tulkinghorn? Let me explain. I planned on spending the 110-minute train journey immersed in my book, a superbly written novella by the incomparable Gabriel García Márquez that I have been thoroughly enjoying and hoped to finish. Unfortunately, my concentration was broken by your loud and unwelcome opinions on British and American politics, which you insisted on sharing with your hapless seatmate and, thanks to your apparent lack of volume control, the entire carriage. You appear to have assigned yourself the role of "Voice of a Generation". As I'm 99% sure that this is a generation to which I also belong, I feel compelled to let you know that you're doing a terrible job and you are relieved of your duties with immediate effect. Please turn in your well-thumbed copy of The Fountainhead at the door; you clearly can't be trusted with it. 

Please don't fall into the clichéd trap of assuming that my displeasure stems from the fact that I don't agree with you. The people that I like and respect can be found in every pocket of the political spectrum that doesn't encourage genocide. No, my anger was provoked by the fact that what you clearly believed to be astute political insight was, in reality, absolute turgid drivel. I would describe it as "bullshit" but this comparison would malign excrement.

I have not studied politics in over four years, but I follow current affairs enough to know that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Two particularly laughable points that you attempted to make to someone who clearly did not want to listen were that the Conservative Party are feminist because they were responsible for the UK's first female prime minister, and that the current government's policies are dreadful because they favour workers over rich people (I quote word for word here). You claimed these as evidence that "people don't always look beyond what they're told", the implication being that these mainstream, Murdoch-sanctioned beliefs are controversial, and that holding them makes you some kind of enlightened radical. You also continually referred to Senator Bernie Sanders as Bernie Saunders, which annoyed me (#FeeltheBern2016).

The only things that I heard you say that were actually correct in any quantifiable way were in relation to the set-up of the British and American political systems, which I recognised as recited almost verbatim from the A Level Politics syllabus that I took five years ago. Politics was my favourite subject in sixth form. I doubt that any of your classmates would say the same.

You talked incessantly for at least an hour, pausing only for breath, or to very occasionally allow the victim of your tedium to make a short and half-hearted response out of uncomfortable politeness. You allowed this as it provided you with a jumping off point for yet another unwanted and patronising lecture about your Grand Ideas, ideas that you presented with the smug self-satisfaction of someone who thinks he has written Ulysses but has actually written List of the Lost. All the while your words were also assaulting my ears, making it impossible for García Márquez to pleasure my mind. Every time I heard the words "I think" – about every thirty seconds, on average – I was filled with dread and rage.

I can also assure you that I wasn't the only person who had this reaction to you. The couple opposite me were laughing among themselves and mimicking you with braying noises, and I heard the girl behind me murmur, "Oh, shut up," when you proudly announced that you read both The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph as if this made you some kind of scholar.

Mr Tulkinghorn, I understand what you were trying to do. I too suffered the effects of combining a Politics A Level with the obnoxious teenage conviction that I possessed a wisdom beyond my years. I too foolishly believed that I had the ability to solve all the world's problems before logic and experience revealed to me that I, to put it bluntly, didn't know shit. However, even at my most annoying and narcissistic, I was never so wildly lacking in self-awareness that I chose to flaunt my perceived superiority to a stranger on a train, subjecting the other 88 people forced to share space with me to my ill-thought-out and ineloquent opinions in the process. You, evidently, have no such reserves.

The worst thing, Mr Tulkinghorn, the very worst thing is that you went beyond distracting me from my book. You have forced me to confront in myself the darkness that lies in every person – the one that we convince ourselves does not really exist until the presence of some disagreeable individual causes it to rear its head. You have left me perturbed by my own capacity for hatred, which I now know, thanks to you, is far greater than I previously realised. I find violence abhorrent, but for at least 30 minutes I had to fight the desire to get out of my seat, walk over to you, and knock out your front teeth (which, I'm guessing from the content and manner of your speech, are massive). With every ill-informed word that spewed out of your insufferable mouth I found myself overcome by an increasingly intense loathing not only for you, not only for people like you, but for the entire western world. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of the organisation but I think this makes you an ISIS recruiter's wet dream.

Eventually, the realisation that I had read five pages without absorbing any of the words and my desire to minimise my susceptibility to an extremist cult caused me to give in. I turned on my iPod (I had already tried to use my headphones alone as earplugs, but they proved too cheap and your voice too pervasive for this to be successful). As I find it impossible to concentrate on reading and listen to music at the same time, this meant that I had to put my book aside and simply stare out of the window. As the sun had gone down, all I could see was the reflection of my own face glaring back at me. It was the kind of face that you'd expect to see on a documentary exploring the psychology of particularly disturbing mass murderers.

The music worked. The violent urges passed. When I tentatively removed a headphone half an hour later, you had fallen silent. But mental echoes of your smug, irritating voice remained with me for some time, and I knew that I had to deal with these feelings, lest they become toxic enough to overtake my mind completely. The pen is mightier than the sword, so I turn to the written word in search of an adequate expression of my fury – although a sword would have gone down a treat at the time.

In short, Mr Tulkinghorn: go fuck yourself.

Yours faithfully,

Rowena Ball