If you commute to work, there's a strong chance you've never spoken to the other people on your train. You're way too engrossed in your phone/free paper/Kindle/book to give a flying fuck about chatting to the person squidged into the clammy, litter-strewn seat next to you. Why would you bother? They're probably as miserable as you, equally annoyed at the cretin talking loudly on his phone, or that pain in the arse wedging an incredibly smelly egg sandwich into their mouths.
But this group of commuters in Wales have inspired us to be generally better people on our daily commute – because they've just thrown a Christmas party on their daily train journey on the 8.08am from Abergavenny to Cardiff, and it's filled us with Christmas cheer.
The group of six pals, who regularly travel together on the train, decked out their carriage of choice with paper chains, donned Christmas paper hats and drank prosecco and dined on croissants. They even got the rest of the train into the Christmas spirit, according to The Telegraph.
One of the party, Chris Lines, who works for charity Sustain Wales, said: 'As we often spend 40 minutes a day travelling to work together, we thought 'why don't we have a Christmas party?' We brought along prosecco, smoked salmon and sausages and we even had paper chains on the windows and pulled crackers.'
He added: 'Because there were only two carriages we were a bit cramped, so we had to sit at a table that had someone already sitting there. We asked him if he minded lifting up his laptop so we could put our Christmas tablecloth on. He looked at us as if we were crazy, but he soon got into the swing of things.'
This isn't the first time we've heard about commuters having a party on the train – the Metro reported on a similar bash on a train from Sutton to London Bridge a few weeks back. So are Christmas parties on train carriages going to become a thing? We doubt it, judging by the scrooges still getting the Tube with us, but at least this story shows you can become mates with your fellow commuters and make the whole thing less hellish.
**Follow Lauren on Twitter @laurenjsmith **
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.