There is a certain type of person here in Britain known as a trainspotter.

Confusingly, these are not the type of people featured in the 1996 film "Trainspotting." The people in that film were Scottish heroin addicts. This isn't one of those cases of the British using a different word for something than we do, as when they refer to soccer as "football," or cookies as "biscuits." They refer to heroin addicts as "heroin addicts."

My only guess on the film's name is that it test marketed better than a film called "Heroin Addicts!"

Actual trainspotters are generally gray-haired chaps with expensive cameras and thermoses full of tea. Far from spending their day under the influence of debilitating illegal drugs, they are more likely to be seen sitting on the end of a train platform.

We have at least five regular trainspotters in Cardiff. On any given day, you will find them photographing and documenting every single train to roll into Cardiff Central Railway Station. The two blokes who camp out on the eastern edge of platform 4 are such fixtures that you can actually see them on the >Google Maps satellite picture of the station. Rain or shine, they are always there.

I am fascinated by these guys. It's not like we have spectacularly cool trains in Wales. Most of those running through the coal-laden valleys are rickety old pieces of junk that look like Soviet-era rejects. I can imagine members of a politburo pounding their fists against tables and screaming, "These trains bring shame to Mother Russia!"

It would seem to me that once you've seen one clunking, squealing, never-on-time piece of junk, you've seen them all. But the trainspotters can't get enough, studiously marking in notebooks and occasionally conferring with one another on exactly when the 15:54 to Aberdaugleddau managed to stagger to the platform.

There is something comforting about the trainspotters, I suppose. In the U.S., if people displayed this sort of dedication to the workings of a transportation network they would be on the next CIA flight to a Kazakhstan prison. Although, to be fair, the frumpy anorak-wearing chaps at Cardiff Central probably aren't at the top of al-Qaida recruiters' cold call lists.

Indeed, you've got to imagine they're not getting too many phone calls from anyone. I can't see them as a people for whom TiVo would be at all necessary. And yet, I am jealous.

I see the trainspotters each day as I bounce toward the university campus. They've got their notebooks and tea and portable chairs and all-weather gear, and I think to myself: "Ah, that's what I want to be doing! I don't want to be writing tedious essays about 17th century poets' impressions of Croesoswallt. I want to be out there, in the great outdoors -- breathing in the exhilarating fumes of the mighty Pacer 142's 460bhp diesel engine!"

I don't really, of course. If I were a trainspotter, I would put whisky in my tea and draw pictures of breasts in my notebook. What I actually want is to not be doing what I'm doing. I want to not be buried in papers, or waking up in panics over deadlines and expectations. I want to not be experiencing a stress so immense that I can feel it physically.

That isn't what I was saying a year and a half ago. I can remember trying to will the plane to fly faster when I first came to Britain. I was desperate to immerse myself in all things Welshy, because I was tired of having spent so many unhappy years working for the Global Media Conspiracy. And, way back when I started my life in media, I was champing at the bit to do so, desperate to get away from the tedious life of not really caring about college.

At the heart of it, I struggle to be happy with what I have. This is that "grass is always greener" thing they warned us about when we were children, conveyed to us through the plight of a hungry goat. I can remember thinking when I first heard that story: "I wish I were a goat."

So I guess what appeals to me about the trainspotters is their dedication to task. I have to build myself up, work myself into a frenzy for every little chore these days. In addition to the stress of actually writing the papers is the stress of finding the motivation to write them.

I wouldn't think a trainspotter suffers this sort of internal battle; he or she doesn't sit there and lament, "What's the point?", because there is no point. It's something they enjoy doing and that's enough.

It should be enough. They say that if you find a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life. My problem is I love not working.

But I'm still going to try to learn from the trainspotters. They've found Zen in cups of tea and repetitive tasks. I'm lucky to have them there as part of my daily commute, to remind me that life can be full no matter what you fill it with. If they can be happy tracking the old 121s, I can be happy writing essays on major themes in post-devolution literature.

Although I'm definitely going to need that whiskey in my tea.

Chris Cope lives with his wife in Cardiff, Wales. His column appears every other Tuesday.