It’s too cold to even contemplate walking or cycling into the work, so chances are you’ll be spending the a sizeable chunk of your morning and evenings starring out of a bus window into dark nothingness or with your face shoved into someone’s armpit on a packed commuter train trying not to die of boredom. But fear not, we’ve compiled a list of the best boredom busters to keep you company no matter how long and arduous your commute is. You can thank us later.
**The Two-Stop Quickie **
Just because your journey is short doesn’t meant that you should have to suffer actually having to use your imagination or dealing with boredom - these aren’t the dark ages after all. Enter Taylor Swift, the iPhone and Goggle Play app based on her Black Space single from her new album 1989. It allows you to go on an immersive journey using 360 degree cameras through an incredibly grand house, where you can get involved in multiple story lines and get access to behind the scenes footage. Defo one for fans, but it’s seriously impressive regardless.
The 20 Minute Hour Overground Bop
This is one for anyone looking for time to kill between the tortuously long wait between series of Sherlock. A Hollow Body is an app brought to you by the Museum of London and is a narrated walk London’s winding streets and through St Paul’s Cathedral inspired by the original Sherlock stories. This is definitely not a tour guide and feels more like being walking through a film where you are the main character and you’re encouraged to to ‘observe the city, its inhabitants and buildings and to peel back its complex layers and stories’. Especially good to add a bit of excitement to actually commuting through London, which can be impossibly dreary, but ace regardless.
** 30 Minutes On a Tube Without 3G **
It may fill certain sections of the public with despair, but the simple fact is for most of us there is nothing less enjoyable than half an hour stuck without access to the internet. But fear not, with a little bit of forward planning your journey can not only be bearable but actually fully enjoyable and there is no better case in point than downloading Jarvis Cocker’s BBC radio podcasts Wireless Nights. Inspired by the thoughts he had during his own bouts of insomnia, the series explores everything form badger colonies, the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, on-call transplant surgeons and night workers on the National Grid. It’s basically impossible to be cross about a commute when you’re listening to Jarvis’s laconic voice and the show was a winner of the Prix Italia for Extraordinary Originality and Innovation, a top European radio prize.
** The 40 Minute Bus Ride**
Make the most of the fact that you have 3G and get involved with Chelsea Handler’s stomach-achingly hilarious Uganda Be Kidding Me Netflix special (also available on YouTube). Just be prepared for slightly odd looks when you, inevitable, snort your morning coffee through your nose because you’re laughing too hard. Quite simply the funniest standup performance we’ve seen all year.
** The Hour and Upwards Schlep **
Long journeys can actually be a real pleasure if you enjoy a solitary moment to yourself, but especially if you've got an amazing audiobook to keep you company. We’re currently obsessed with All The Light We Cannot See: A Novelby Anthony Doerr and narrated by Zach Appelman. It’s about a girl called Marie-Laure, who lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of her local area so she can memorise it by touch and find her way home from wherever she is. When she is 12, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s great-uncle lives in a house by the sea. Only thing is they’ve brought the museums most prized and dangerous artefact with them. It’s riveting stuff and bound to keep you on the edge of your (train) seat for your whole journey. Just be careful not to miss your stop.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.