This is embarrassing, not because of falling alseep in an embarrassing place, but because of my very loud snoring.

When I was 23 I started a (very short lived) high school teaching job in Sydney (Oz) which is 100 miles south of beautiful Newcastle. I didn't want to be a teacher and had been searching for another job from a few months before but no luck so far, so I decided to still live in Newcastle and travel down there by train each Monday morning and home again on Friday afternoons.

I used to catch the 4am train on Mondays but I could never get to sleep the night before because I hated going to Sydney and hated the job, so I used to pick a seat where I could sleep in peace, alone in one of those quaint old 6-8 seat compartments. We had to change trains halfway and then the commuters would get on and the other sleepers like me had to sit up in a carriage with lots of seats.

I would do my best to stay awake, but inevitably I would fall asleep again.

I will always carry the visual memory of getting off the train with every eye on me, and everyone watching me would have a very strange look on their face. I had obviously regaled the whole carriage *again* with my very loud snoring. The worst thing was that I could do nothing about it, at all, but at least there was one compensation: I would never ever get to talk to any of these people or get to know them. Big city folk don't make a point of getting to know each other. So I was basically an anonymous person.

Helen PS: Still no cure for the snoring.