On grading in trains in France in the late 1990s

When Andrea lived in France from 1996 to 2000, I frequently took the train back and forth from Basel to Bordeaux (where she was for one year) and Poitiers (where she was for three years). I planned to use the train time for grading whenever the Basel semester was going on, and sometimes I could get a lot of work done on the long trips. But very often, it turned out, people would ask me what I was doing and then start a conversation with me. If I wanted to be left alone, it was better to just read, since nobody wonders what you're doing if you're staring at a book. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 October 2023)