'I'd like to welcome customers aboard the sixteen-thirty-three Virgin train to Birmingham New Street...'

If you travel by train as much as I do you'll be used to that sort of announcement coming over the PA system as soon as you've got settled in your seat.

All very friendly and reassuring, you might think - but I can't agree. I hate that announcement, and have done ever since I first heard it, or something like it, around the time the rail service was privatised.

And what I hate about it is one word: customers.

I am not a customer. A train is not a shop. I have not boarded that train to buy something, though I have probably paid in advance for a very expensive ticket. But what I've got for my money is a journey. And customers don't go on journeys; travellers do.

I love travelling by train, and it's very much because of that sense of going somewhere different. You wait on the platform for the arrival of the train, along with all those other people embarking on their own journeys to all sorts of different places for all kinds of different reasons. I still feel a sense of excitement when the train is glimpsed in the distance.

Once in your seat, you look out at the passing landscape. You see the scenery change, and perhaps the weather. You watch people out there in the world beyond your journey going about their daily concerns. Even on the most mundane journey - for a day's shopping in Newcastle for instance - there's a sense of excitement, of going somewhere.

And then they reduce that sense of excitement to a mere commercial transaction.

I blame Margaret Thatcher - or Thatcherism, anyway. It was under her Premiership that everything suddenly became a matter of commercial negotiation. The idea of public good went out of the window, along with that thing called society.

Take the bodies that supply our water. I can remember the droughts of the seventies - 1976 was the hottest and driest, I think. In those days the water supply was still under public control. There were advertisements everywhere asking us all to do our bit by not wasting water. We were urged to take showers where possible, share baths, stop watering our gardens. And people very largely took notice and did what they could to conserve the supply. After all, the supply belonged to all of us, even if we sometimes grumbled a bit about the way it was managed.

Nowadays, if we're told water's in short supply, we blame it on the privatised water companies - their lack of efficiency, their failure to plan ahead, putting shareholders' interests before those of customers. After all, that's what they're in business for - to make a profit. Our relationship with them has become a purely commercial one, so we no longer feel that same sense of having a responsibility to help them out.

I know we can't go back to those days BT (Before Thatcher), and I acknowledge there would be lots of things we'd find weren't as good as we sometimes think they were.

But I do wish the rail companies would go back to looking on us as travellers. I don't want to be stuck in a shop. I want to be going somewhere.