The good thing about The Hoodie is he's skinny and doesn't move or say anything because he'll generally be aged between 14 and 17. Teenage boys are obsessed by dirt and bugs, so contrary to appearances he'll be clean and probably smell of Lynx body spray in the hope that a buxom blonde woman will jump on him unannounced. This will never happen, so in most respects he's OK as a travelling companion.

They're the only generation who don't talk on a mobile phone. The male of the species certainly doesn't have verbal exchanges as single monosyllabic answers don't really constitute a conversation. They will only text, but teenage boys don't have much to communicate unless they're organising another looting spree, so there shouldn't be much activity on the keypad either.

The only down side is that he'll have his personal music piped into his ears at full blast, and will be using cheap imported earphones which leak noise through to the whole carriage. The earphones  will be so useless you can tell what verse of Empire State of Mind,  Jay Z is 'singing'. If rap can ever be classified as singing.

How to spot The Hoodie
You can recognise The Hoodie because he's wearing a hoodie (no!). He'll be slumped in his seat as if he's in the last stages of a particularly nasty Victorian disease, with the zip pulled up so it's over his mouth. His underpants will be visible as his jeans will only come half way up his backside. A weird style craze which to that generation will eventually be more retrospectively embarrassing than the fashion low of mullet haircuts. He'll be wearing some £150 trainers which are deemed to be the height of design chic at this very moment, but in fact are a branding rip off made by an 8 year old Indian boy who gets paid £2 a day. He might have nicked these from FootLocker or more likely his Mum would've bought them for him for his birthday. You won't be able to see The Hoodie's face, aside possibly from his nose, but no other feature. Underneath it will be a teenage boy with rampant acne. The point of the hoodie uniform is it hides his hair and his eyes although no one has ever worked out why this is so important.

Survival tips
Not all teenage boys are like The Hoodie, just as all teenage girls are not all Miss Wrigley-like (see below), but it's worth remembering that single Hoodie travellers are worth seeking out, just as Miss Wrigley is worth avoiding.

Sitting next to a Hoodie is a relatively good option and it makes you look like you're community spirited and sympathetic towards teenagers despite the fact that they set light to a furniture store in Croydon. Besides, bad skin isn't catching. Many commuters don't do this out of choice, because they're instinctively anti-teenager, and openly so, in a way which would be illegal if their discrimination was based on colour and not age. The only proviso is that you have to be profoundly hard of hearing or have your own ipod/phone/MP3 player which can deliver music right down into the inner reaches of your ear holes, loud enough to drown out their second hand dance music.

Don't bother sitting next to a group of hoodies however. Where one is a paragon of commuting virtue (minus the noise), a group of hoodies is the polar opposite. Noisy, sweary, giggly and fidgety. They play up to each other and show off in a way that's so embarrassingly immature, it makes you wish you could shoot them on sight. Move as far away as possible, or confront them and tell them to behave, but only if you think they look weedy and timid enough and don't appear to be carrying any lethal weapons or fire starting materials.