Everyone looked up when I walked into the carriage this morning.

Sadly, they were not admiring my new floaty skirt, or my recently purged through food poisoning figure, but that of tall, thin girl, walking a couple of paces behind me.

She was (or rather is - I haven't done anything lethal to her yet, but it won't be long) very striking; about 6in taller than everyone else, huge hazel eyes, immaculate cut brown hair (real proper dark chestnuty brown, not just brown) and she was wearing a very bright fuchsia outfit.

The combination of all of the above meant you could hardly fail to notice her and, being eclipsed by the shadow of her aura, you could entirely fail to notice self in new floaty skirt.

In fact, friend Mark entirely failed to notice me when I found a seat opposite him, sat on it and smiled. He was still transfixed by vision in pink (VIP) who decided to add insult to injury by returning his dopey stare with a smile and asking if the seat next to him was free.

Was expecting Mark to reply with some sort of semi-jokey: "You don't have to ask it's not my train..." type comment but he merely smiled unblinkingly while murmuring: "Absolutely, free for you."

"Hi, I'm Virginia," she said, introducing herself. ("You never introduce yourself to other commuters," Sarah pointed out when I told her the details of the VIP. "It's not a party - it's a journey to work...").

Mark seemed to have forgotten this number-one rule of commuting, though.

"Mark," he responded. "Lovely to meet you. I've not noticed you on this train before."

And he certainly would have noticed her had she been on it before. So one can assume, I thought to myself (since I was being ignored by both of them) that she had not been on it before.

"No," she replied, in response to my thoughts. "This is my first day commuting. I've got a new job in London. So I guess this is it for the next few years."

"Or the rest of your life..." I mumbled, but nobody heard me.

"So what exactly is it you do?" asked Mark.

"I'm a web designer," said VIP. "I used to work for a company in Brighton but I was headhunted by this set-up in London and the offer was too good to resist."

"How fascinating," said Mark (the luddite who refuses even to leave messages on voicemail, believing they will be lost in some phone computer abyss).

"That must be so exciting."

"Uh hmmm," I cleared my throat, causing Mark to look away from the vision in pink and momentarily catch my eye, which warned him that his cover would be blown if he continued to ignore me and pretend to be interested in the peculiarities of web site design.

"Hello," he said. "I didn't see you there (this much was blindingly obvious). This is Lizzie..." he said, turning back to VIP, and hoping that that would be an end to my throaty interruption.

But Virginia, bless her naive fresh enthusiastic little soul, smiled and spoke to me. "Hiiiii! So does everyone know each other? How lovely! I thought I'd spend most of journey just staring out the window..."

"Actually, I know Mark because he used to work for the same company as I do," I told her. While I was speaking, the train stopped at Hassocks and on got blond, athletic man who strode towards us and smiled, at me, or so I thought. But it turned out that actually he was smiling, like everyone else, at Virginia.

"Hallo there," he said, casually, as if he already knew her from somewhere, and totally ignoring me. "How's your first day going?"