Try not to think any more about the carefree existence of the Swedish commuter. He does, despite appearances, have his own problems — currently, choosing a locomotively relevant selection of books. Yes to The Railway Children, no to Murder on the Orient Express, and Ann Summers’ Get Down and Sexercise rejected on the grounds that immediate implementation could impede access to the buffet bar.

Of course, putting aside any international commuter jealousy and bitterness, we know what the Swedes are really doing. Library book dispensers on trains are nothing to do with books. Sweden isn’t, as a result of all this, going to become more literate, and start quoting bits of The Brothers Karamazov during trade meetings at the UN. No one actually reads when they commute. “Reading” is all about avoiding eye-contact with anyone in your carriage. You are, after all, travelling at 80mph, in a sealed pod, with a great many people — any one of whom could try to talk to you about secret codes in the Bible, or George Galloway.

As anyone who uses the London Underground will confirm, the Evening Standard, circulation 350,000, isn’t a newspaper at all. No one pays the slightest attention to the articles inside. It’s merely a disposable, 40p screen that one erects for privacy between Goodge Street and Archway. But this screen is vital. Without it, the only option, on being approached by a nutter, is to pretend to have seen something fascinating out of the window — even though you are, at the time, in a 12-mile-long pitch-black tunnel under Camden Town. Halfway through such an exercise — maybe when staring intently at a brick all covered in black sticky fluff — one can start to wonder just who the nutter is here, after all.

So when one views the Swedish “book dispenser” in this light, one can see that there is no cultural one-up-country-ship going on here. This is nothing to do with literature. They might just as well be vending fans.

Instead, what the Swedes are admitting is that their Scandinavian traits of politeness and consideration have left them with a fatal flaw. For, unlike we duplicitous Brits, the courteous Swedes are incapable of pretending to have just seen a dear and long-lost friend walking a mile underground at Kungsträdgården station. They must have the books, you see, or the Swedish economy may grind to a halt. It could be poleaxed by its most important driving forces going Awol, engaged in endless conversation with someone who claims to know the number of the beast, and who can prove that it puts you straight through to the switchboard at the BBC.

Personally, I think the book dispenser is a wasted opportunity — a manifestation of our insistence that a hideously overcrowded public transport system is a bad thing. Is it, necessarily? If we could just alter our perspective a little — maybe by saying “Excuse” 15 times, and painstakingly shuffling three inches to the right — we could see the good side: just what positive things a tin-can-packed solid with humanity has to offer.

For instance, we’d all love to have a wide selection of friends, spanning all ages, cultures, professions and sexual persuasions. Well — here they all are! Pressing into your back! Within these airless walls is a human Google — practically everything you could ever need in one lifetime. The number of a good plumber. The address of the best mojitos in Barcelona. A phenomenal one-night stand. Someone who knows Julie Elliman, with whom you lost contact in 1990. A guy you can pretend is your friend for the next ten years, sporadically tapping up for free legal advice. Someone who knows how to falsify a breathalyser test. A nun. If only we could all get talking, commuting would be transformed from a semi- unendurable hell into the biggest, most egalitarian networking mechanism known to man.

Having given great consideration to the nature of unsolicited conversation and the mechanisms of wider socialisation, I’ve concluded that the best way to get this system up and running would be drugs. I’ve taken the liberty of reserving 15,000 canisters of Entonox, otherwise known as laughing gas, which I propose to pump constantly into the train carriages of Britain. I presume that the Government will be all gung-ho for it — after all, if you can’t improve your transport system, surely the next logical and, indeed, polite, thing is to get everyone using it so off their faces that they don’t notice.

Obviously there would be some cost attached to this. Legal yet mood-altering gases don’t come free. However, my understanding of the transport system here is that if you say it’s “for the Olympics”, you instantly get £1 billion and permission to knock down any building, up to and including St Paul’s. And what better welcome could there be, for the sports-fans of the world, than a chatty British populace, and a Northern Line pumped full of laughing gas? It’s better than some manky old copy of Northanger Abbey in Swedish, anyway.

A sin that's quite original

I note that some Italian organisation* has conducted a poll in which the Italian public ranked the Deadly Sins in order of awfulness. “Gluttony” won — presumably because of its subsequent impact on the line of a good suit. Lust came in around 17 — just below “Double parking outside a chemist while picking up a prescription for an ailing child.” It’s good to see that, as with everything else in the world, sin is subject to cultural relativism. Here in don’t-get-above-your-station Britain, the worst sin, I suspect, is widely considered to be “Pride”. Or maybe wearing povvo trainers from the market.

*Possibly the Catholic Church; I guess it comes under “market research” for them.

Back to basics

My favourite moment so far from this year’s Celebrity Big Brother: during a debate about wearing fur, page 3 girl Jodie Marsh accuses “the Eskimos” of being “primitive”. “Having heard the way you live your life, I don’t think you are the one to lecture the Eskimo about being primitive,” George Galloway replies, tartly. “But why don’t they have all shops and computers and stuff?” Marsh replies, perplexed as to why any culture would be without a TK Maxx.

Caitlin Moran’s Big Brother blog: http://timesonline.typepad.com/big_brother/

Times Recommends

• Chelsea Flower Show has lost the plot
• The age of personal vitriolic abuse
• Obama: the new Great Redeemer