Suicide Isn’t What It Used To Be

I was standing at the station this morning when quite without any advance notice a little old lady walked up to me and said: ‘Those rails are there to stop people jumping in front of the trains. Wasn’t like that in the old days.’

Tactfully, I bit back the temptation to say: ‘No – then people were free to jump in front of trains as much as they liked. Shocking abuse of our liberties.’

I stared obediently at the railings in question. As it turned out, they were smack in the middle of the platform. So would-be suicides would have had a spectacularly wonky sense of spatial awareness to let the railings come between them and train-shaped death. They’d basically have to run away from the onrushing train as if their lives depended on it, which sounds like a pretty poor definition of suicide to me.

The railings also looked Victorian to me. How old was this little old lady? What ‘old days’ was she referring to – the middle ages?

She might have had a point there: people threw themselves in front of trains a whole lot less then.