When routine bites hard
Now that I go to the office every day, my mornings have atrophied into exactly the kind of routine I went freelance to avoid. How ironic. It's only temporary, while Lee and I finish the sitcom, but it's potentially depressing. Unless, that is, you allow the odd little marker flags of routine to stimulate your imagination.

I leave the house, Reggie Perrin style, at 8.40am, walk up let's-call-it Coleridge Close, turn right into Tennyson Avenue and then across the common onto Wordsworth Drive, at which point, if it's really cold, as it is at present, I start to warm up - is that something to do with "the burn" that people who run get? Anyway, the first reassuring marker is the slightly odd-looking schoolgirl whom I pass walking in the other direction (presumably, to school) at the dip of Tennyson Avenue. It's initially quite alarming to pass the same person at the same point at the same time, but it certainly saves wondering what time it is. Then, as I proceed in an easterly direction down let's-call-it Wordsworth Drive in the direction of Redhill, I pass a young mum with a toddler in a pushchair at precisely the same point. What slaves we all are to routine. From men to women to schoolchildren. You have to assume that both of these otherwise random residents of Reigate and Redhill, the girl and the mum, recognise that they pass the same man in a long coat with a hat on listening to a portable music player every day and at the same point. Perhaps this gives them pause about the routine nature of their own lives. Do they perhaps wonder who I am and where I'm going? Actually, it's an easy guess that I'm walking towards Redhill to catch a train, but do they fill in other details using their imagination? Do they think I'm a kind-looking man, or treat me, like all unattended men of a certain age (and certainly those in long coats cutting across commons) as a potential child-killer?

On my way down the hill, I pass a residential street along which, my powers of deduction tell me, a junior school is situated. Young mums pour out of there at about 8.50, some on foot, most in road-hogging cars. As I cross this road, I am always struck (although not actually struck) by how reckless and in a hurry these mums in cars are, once they've dropped off the kids at school. Or perhaps they are just distracted by the million and one things they have left to do. Either way, it sometimes feel as if they are trying to run me down.

My next routine marker now comes as I approach Redhill Station just before 9.10am, as passengers from a very busy train trickle into Redhill itself across the pelican crossing. It is here that I have started to notice a rotund man, who may only be in his late 20s or early 30s, and he's always smiling to himself. The first time I saw him I thought perhaps he had just thought of something funny. The second time it struck me as a not unpleasant trait (after all, what is there to smile about if you are commuting into and not out of Redhill?) - some may find it creepy or odd that he is always so amused, but not me. I like it. He has a Hawaiian look about him. Is that why he is so preternaturally happy? Because he comes from the land of hula skirts and Elvis Presley? It's good that this happy-go-lucky nature travels so well.

I am one of those people who catches the same train and thus stands at the exact same spot on Platform 2 so that I can get on the foremost carriage at the same place and hopefully get one of the non-table seats facing backwards, platform-side. If it's a window seat, as it must be, I get a hook to hang my overcoat on. On the platform I always see the same man on his way to work (slightly later than the commuter herd, like me), also in an overcoat but never in a hat, despite his bald head. He looks quite hard but quite smart. He reminds me of the fairly obscure American screen actor Elias Koteas. Anyway he gets on at the first set of doors, not the second, so I never see him in transit. But I have seen him in London, on the platform of the Underground, Victoria Line, heading North, like me. We have so much in common, and yet, so little.

Incidentally, on Friday, when approaching Victoria Station on my usual train in my usual seat, as I was putting on my overcoat, I accidentally brushed the head of the man sitting in front of me with my sleeve. He was quite old and had a bald head with some wispy hair on it, which he immediately brushed flat, as if perhaps he thought a ghost had ruffled his hair. I don't think he realised I had done it, so no apology was necessary. I just sat down and hoped he wasn't too spooked.

Well, I saw that very same man today, on the same train, in the same seat. He's as bad as the rest of us with his routine. I almost felt like brushing his wispy head again with my sleeve but held back. You shouldn't mess with people's heads, but one morning last week, I had forgotten my Travelcard and when I was just about to pass the schoolgirl in the dip of let's-call-it Tennyson Avenue, I remembered and turned round and went back in the other direction. That must have freaked her out. She was probably put off thinking about her homework for a second there.