meish dot org: life, unfolding

[I recently upgraded to a new phone. In the process of scrubbing things off the old handset, I found this word sketch of a tube journey home from an evening out a while back.]

Men on the northern line coming from the awards dinner I’ve just come from. I’m sober(ish), but they’re drooling on each other, discussing the best satellite porn channels and the acts they’re going to perform on their wives when they get home. It’s charming, in a ridiculous, pissed, shouty, colleaguey machismo bullshit obnoxious kind of way.

The bald northern one calls everything and everyone a cunt. The fat one apologises for him repeatedly, explaining “he’s from Leeds”, before leering at girls on adjacent seats and trying to persuade the other to stop off for a final pint at Charing Cross.

This, I feel, would be a bad move.

It seems that several pints, absinthe and champagne in (their words) “less time than it takes to have a wank” are a recipe for lurching, leering and idiocy.

“Have you got a mirror?” Baldy asks every female on the train. No-one has.

“Have I got bloodshot eyes?” he demands. He does, but no-one will tell him, because no-one wants to get involved. Wisely, it seems.

“You’re an ugly, fat cunt,” drools baldy.

“Yeah,” says fatty, “but at least I’ve still got hair”

Thank heaven for small mercies. And my stop.

For as long as I’ve lived in London, I’ve lived under the flight path.

That’s not saying much, of course - most of central, west and south-west London is affected by plane noise, as they circle over the suburbs, make a languid turn over Tower bridge and then approach to Heathrow along the Thames.

I remember standing on the school playing fields (when I should undoubtedly have been chasing a hockey ball or hustling to class) and looking up at planes not so far overhead, trying to identify the airline from the tail fin design. Alitalia. BA. Pan Am. SAS. Lufthansa. Countries in the sky.

For most of the last decade, I’ve lived directly under the flight path, in Mortlake by the river, which is the point where the wheels come down on the landing approach.

When we first moved here, I was hyper-aware of the planes. I’d wake up as the first flight droned overhead around 04.30, before dropping off again. And then, throughout the day and evening, every thirty seconds, they’d rumble over on their way to landing: loud enough that you’d miss a few seconds of important dialogue in the film you were watching, or have to pause your conversation for a spell. Before Concorde stopped flying, the air would be thunderous for nearly a minute as it slid overhead.

Yet most of the time, I didn’t mind the planes. They reminded me that up above, people were about three minutes from landing - homecomings, holidays, greetings and meetings. Three minutes before landing, everything is put away and switched off. There’s nothing to do but look out of the window at the huge expanse of London below and anticipate the moment when you’ll touch down. It’s nice to sit in my study, or in the back garden, or lie in bed and think of people in a suspended, anticipatory, excited state above, just moments from an arrival.

And I’ve been in those planes, too. I purposefully sit by the window when returning to London, usually on the right of the plane, so I can drink in the sparkling city. And what a welcome home.

Greenwich. Tower bridge. Cannon Street. Waterloo. Green Park. Hyde Park and the Royal Albert Hall. The Empress building. Queen’s Club. Hammersmith bridge. Leg o’mutton nature reserve at Barnes. My house, by the bend in the river. Dukes Meadows driving range. Brentford. Hounslow. Heathrow. Home.

In the months after September 11, 2001, the sound of planes took on a different edge. More menacing. Despite the fact that they were still just tootling along toward the landing runway, sometimes the noise sounded surprisingly loud - Too loud? Too low?

And there were other concerns, too - we can’t shop in our local Sainsbury’s without thinking of the tragic tale of the man who fell to earth - a story that sounds apocryphal, but horrifyingly, happened. More than once. Knowing that certainly lends an edge to doing your weekly shop. We glance nervously at the passing planes sometimes, too.

I woke yesterday morning to the sound of birds in the trees outside the window, and wondered what was missing. It took a while to realise the absence of planes made this place feel different.

It’s been a strange combination of eerie and delightful these last few days having no plane noise at all.

No contrails. No regular rumble overhead. Because there are no planes.

The atmosphere over most of Europe, they tell us, is full of dangerous ash. And yet the skies seem so beautifully, strangely empty.

Not to underplay the serious inconvenience caused by inclement meteorological conditions to some parts of the UK, but I’d just like to take a moment to reflect on this typically calm and understated headline from yesterday’s London Evening Standard:

A few points.

If you’re still measuring the snow in inches rather than feet or yards, it’s not an “extreme” weather event, it’s a “bothersome” one. The words “extreme weather” should apply to total snowmageddon, not tobogganing & a bit of a whinge about slippery pavements.

“Extreme weather” seems like a rather odd overstatement by the Met Office. It brings to mind scenes from The Day After Tomorrow. Epic, unbelievable, unusual weather with catastrophic effects.

Hurricane Katrina was extreme. The 1988 ice storm in Quebec was extreme. The heatwave + drought + bushfires in SE Australia in early 2009 were extreme.

In this photo, taken during last night’s snow, you can still see the cars.

This is a good indication that it’s not an extreme weather event. Yet. Whatever the hysteria from media and transport providers may otherwise indicate.

OK, it doesn’t snow often in London, but it does snow in southern England in winter sometimes, and in northern England and Scotland more often. So it’s not that weird.

We can be forgiven for being underprepared for a long stint of cold or inclement weather (hot, cold…) because most of the time, this country is just a bit middling, weather-wise. But we have no excuse for over-reacting and creating blanket hype and pointless coverage about extreme hardship and crisis caused by some seasonally-expected wet white stuff. Breaking news: snow happens in winter.

Snowpocalypse by antimega

(My favourite example of this was yesterday, when my local train service provider, SouthWest Trains, cancelled a number of services for today in advance because of the weather, which I thought was particularly brilliant considering it hadn’t even snowed yet. It was almost like they were saying “we know that however much it snows, we’re not going to be able to cope”)

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Given that I currently spend a minimum of two and a half hours in transit every day, I’ve been pondering for a while whether there’s a particular thing that would improve my commute.

Certainly less time on public transport would be a boon, but would unfortunately mean living somewhere either entirely unaffordable or unsavoury, neither of which I’m keen to do.

So in the absence of cutting the time spent down, I’ve been wondering whether the addition or removal of anything specific might actually make the whole thing more tolerable.

The short list so far includes:

• Air conditioning on the tube: not a big thing at the moment, and I understand there’s work under way, but some of the lines - the Victoria, mainly - do seem to get ever so fetid in summer rush hours
• Turning off the heating on London bus services: I know that it’s probably related to the engine of the bus, but there’s been times on my twice-daily bustrek that I’ve been sure I could smell something singeing. Like human flesh. Forty years ago, we managed to put a man on the moon. Are we seriously unable to stop grilles pumping out heat on buses during the hottest part of the year?
• People shutting up on the tube: I know it’s a bit anti-social, but on the longest bit of the tube journey, I generally try and read, and if people are shouting at each other in English, Spanish, French or German, I find it enormously distracting, no matter how loud the music in my ears is. So sometimes I wish they’d SHUSH or (better and less grumpy) that there was a dedicated reading/quiet carriage, like on long-distance trains.
• Less human chaos in and around King’s Cross Underground station: I know they’re redeveloping it at the moment, but the fact that there’s only one main entrance/exit which is around a hairpin corner from the ticket gates means that every day - without fail - is a seething mass of bewildered tourists and idiots dragging suitcases behind them and tripping people up while looking for the right exit for the Eurostar, all bottlenecked into a pretty narrow space.

  Plus don’t get me started on the poor escalator and platform etiquette I observe daily - standing still in the “fast lane” or in the doorway to a platform is still one of the quickest ways to get punched in the back of the head in London. Fact.

  In fact, I feel that a general reduction in human idiocy between stepping off the tube and stepping into the office would be a massive (but unlikely) improvement: the main problem here is that I work close to a major transport hub, so all human life is there, albeit mainly just standing about gormlessly and smoking.

  And on a related point, whose bloody stupid idea was it to put a major bus stop on a bit of pavement just around the corner from the station on York Way? The pavement is so narrow and there are regularly 100+ people waiting for the next bus to trundle along, and since they’re not as well-versed in the art of queueing as their W/SW London compatriots, that makes it impossible to actually walk down the pavement, which instead means anyone wishing to do so needs to make a detour into the (three lane, busy) road, which can’t be a long-term good idea.

All of these things are irritating, and removal/refinement/improvement in each area would doubtless improve both the experience of commuting and the state of my mood when I arrive in the office or back at home.

But after much consideration, I must conclude that the single thing that would improve my commute - and, I’m sure, that of countless other poor souls in London - is some sort of ASBO preventing people in branded T-shirts from handing out free commuter newspapers while standing in the middle of the pavement.

I appreciate that their job is to hand out free newspapers, but standing in the middle of a busy public thoroughfare, desperately thrusting free sheets into the hands of harassed commuters may well be an effective way of dispensing resources but it’s a remarkably piss-poor strategy for making people feel well-minded towards the companies who instruct their minions to do so.

Every evening is like a gauntlet of dodging the eager profferings of these branded thrusters. It’s not enough that I don’t actually want to take one of their papers - I still have to dodge and swerve around them as they slow traffic by standing directly in front of the entrance to the station, or in the middle of the pavement, or at the point at which the pelican crossing disgorges onto the main pavement from the road.

I don’t blame the individuals, but I do wish I could get a message to their shift supervisor, or whoever instructs them in the tactics of their tasks.

So here’s a message, specifically to whoever’s in charge of distribution training at thelondonpaper and London Lite, in the hope that this mention will get picked up by their social media signal filters:

Tell your uniformed distributors to stand beside rather than in the flow of foot traffic around major stations and busy areas.

If you don’t, I’m going to report them - and you - for causing an obstruction and endangering safety on the public highway, and start a campaign to get your antisocial tactics banned altogether.

Here endeth the rant.

I’m not a hugely crafty person, and I’m rubbish at finishing massive projects (no time!), but I can’t resist tinkering with things, and I’m a huge map fiend, so I came up with a little crafty project a little while back that even someone with limited crafty talent (i.e. me) would be able to manage: a cross-stitch version of the tube map.

My love/hate relationship with public transport is well documented which made this even more attractive. But if that wasn’t enough, my reasoning was this:

1. It’s all straight lines
2. and blobs for the stations
3. and easy angles
4. it’s already laid out on a grid structure
5. Beck’s simple graphic design means it uses set angles, thicknesses and colours
6. Instantly recognisable, even without any words on it
7. I live in London and take the tube every day
8. It’s just mindless enough to be able to do without full attention i.e. while watching a DVD box set or something on telly

So, here’s how I did it:

1. I got a tube map from the TFL site
2. cropped it to the central zone (basically zone 1 + a chunk of zone 2)
3. in photoshop, erased all the station names
4. still in photoshop, increased contrast
5. used mosaic filter to transform image into 5×5 blocks
6. added a 5×5 grid over the top
7. blanked any squares with partial colour in them (this meant shifting some stations slightly to the left or right)
8. simplified the pattern by filling in boxes with block colour (e.g. stations)
9. went to local craft/knitting shop and selected some embroidery silks based on tubeline colours (not exact, but I can live with approximation)
10. sewed a purple perimeter border which looks decorative but which actually made it easier to count off stitches inside the grid
11. annotated a printed version of the map, with square counts (between stations, for example)
12. started in the bottom right hand corner with the H&C (pink) line and then worked my way around the map, line by line
13. I left all the stations until the end

So here’s the pattern, in case anyone else wants to have a go:

And here’s the (nearly) finished result:

For reference, it’s roughly A4 size, using 14-count Aida fabric (which I got from John Lewis).

It’s not perfect - there are some small counting errors in there, so I had to get a bit liberal with some of the joining angles, especially towards East London, and the stations are a bit square - but it’s not bad for a freehand thing, and a first attempt.

All in all, I’m pretty chuffed.

You can see I’m in the process of adding a border to it, to secure the edges, and I’ve still got to fill in the Thames before I can frame it or turn it into a cushion, but it’s too nice outside today…

There are these signs up on hoardings around the back end of Kings Cross, (where our new offices are), which say pithy things about the area -

King’s Cross is being delivered
King’s Cross is convenient urban living
King’s Cross is 4.9 million sq ft of office space

and so on.

The thing is, as ever, there’s more to the area than that.

True, there’s an enormous amount of development going on in the neighbourhood, and in a couple of years it’ll be a major hub of arts, public space, transport and working (or so we are told).

But for the moment, (and for me) at least, King’s Cross is:

1. Still a bit seedy, actually, especially when you find yourself walking down a back street in the dark, plus there’s a lot of boarded up shops and things
2. A constant negotiation of route-to-work-optimisations being shut down (there’s so much building work going on that they keep closing entrances from the tube and the station, which means every few weeks the route needs to change)
3. Lacking in decent lunch options
4. Easy to get away from (except when they throttle the tube entrances at rush-hour, which happens, um, every night)
5. The location of the first UK Blogmeet (in June 2000, at the Lincoln Lounge, fact fans)
6. Walkable to loads of places (like Islington, Coram Fields, Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury)
7. Thronged with arriving befuddled tourists wearing sandals and dragging gigantic cases and getting in the way…and departing stag/hen weekenders in matching cowboy hats, perched on weekend wheely cases, staring tiredly at the departures board
8. The departure point for trains to places I used to live (Leeds, Edinburgh) and where I have connections (Glasgow, York, Newcastle). Every day, cutting through the station on the way to work, the temptation to hop onto an idling train and be whisked off up to Scotland or the north is rather huge. So far, I have resisted.
9. Littered with cranes and man in hi-viz jackets/hard hats
10. Where I first kissed my husband (before we were married, obviously), in a terrible pub on the station concourse, nine years ago this weekend, with terrible helmet hair, after rushing across North London on a motorbike to meet him off a train so we could swap compilation mini-discs we’d made for each other.

A little while ago, I was asked if I would contribute to a new blog called I love my postcode, dedicated to people writing enthusiastically about the (mostly London, I think, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be national) postcode where they live.

Now, while I have lived happily in my little neck of the woods for over six years, I can’t claim to love it, exactly - I don’t feel hugely proud of or affiliated with it - but I do like it quite a lot (else I would have moved by now, clearly).

With that in mind, you can read my contribution here - warning: contains references to rowing, cakes, eccentric Victorian explorers, aeroplanes, cat-squeezing and the mighty 209 bus.

Things it doesn’t mention, but should:

• How much we like queuing (and how well we do it, at least at one bus stop)
• The man on our street who staggers home, besuited and roaringly drunk of an evening, singing shouting cricket songs (mainly “Barmy Army! Barmy Army!”)
• The amazing ability of one local pub (which shall remain nameless, but let’s just say it’s got a prime position on the river) to completely ruin any drink they serve. I don’t know if it’s how they keep the barrels or what, but they could ruin water, that place. Also, m’neighbour Dan and I get dirty looks whenever we go in because we won the pub quiz the first (and only) time we showed up for it. Sorry.
• The fact that the local mini cabs seem to operate on the vaguest possible terms - whenever I take one, I have to give them directions, tell them how much it costs, once even tell them how to operate a clutch & gears

If you love, or are otherwise fond of your postcode, pop over to the ILMP blog and submit your answers to the same questions.

I believe you can also buy knickers with your postcode on them. If nothing else, this would seem to offer a rich source of ribaldry and jokes about not going south of the river at this time of night etc etc.

On the first day, it was a man with a rather tired-looking accordian, squeezing out arpeggios under the arch near the bus station, where the acoustics were good.

A few days later, a trumpeter had joined him. Together they wheezed through the standards as commuters hurried past.

Nearly a week later, while the rain dripped across the archway entrance, the accordianist and the trumpet-player were accompanied by a dishevelled man hitting a plastic fishcrate with sticks. He wasn’t exactly in time, but then the rhythm lolloped and lurched about anyway, and it amused the people sheltering in the archway from the rain.

A few days afterwards, they’d acquired another trumpeter - a man with fast fingers and an ear for a jazz version.

A week later, in the darkness of a cold winter morning, the man with the plastic fishcrates was gone, replaced by a drummer with a djembe, tapping out urgent dancing rhythms while the trumpeters tooted a lively version of jingle bells, and the accordianist filled out the song with great heaving, huffing chords.

Commuters tapped their feet while they waited for their buses, dropped the odd shiny coin into an upturned hat as they passed by, and smiled.

Today marks the ten year anniversary of my return to London. Although I wasn’t born here, I grew up in this big, weird, expensive, dirty, sprawling mass of inhumanity, and went through primary and secondary schools before leaving, aged 16, to attend college in Canada.

After college, I headed for Scotland, and by the time I’d descended from the highlands, my family home had moved away from London to the north of England. I never identified as a Londoner in the first place - not born here, parents from elsewhere - and I’d left a few years earlier anyway, but by 1992 I wasn’t even a non-Londoner not-living in London anymore.

Several years of studying, working and living around the UK and around the world, followed.

But in 1998, I applied for a job in London, got it, and made the move over a chllly weekend in October by means of a backpack and a borrowed suitcase.

In the ten years I’ve been in London this time around - the longest I’ve lived in any place, ever - I’ve lived in seven houses, with ten flatmates (including one I never met; two Australians; two South Africans; one Irishman; one Nuzzlander; four bloggers; and one lovely husband) and one small brown cat, in five postcodes (all west of Hampstead Heath, east of Kew Gardens, north of the South Circular and south of the North Circular). I’ve changed jobs several times - sometimes within the same organisation - and have spent I don’t know how much on travelcards over the decade of commuting.

So here’s where I am.
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As I’ve posited in these pages before, the main reason for having a blog and keeping it going for nearly nine years (!) is to be able to track the annual cavalcade of winged whimsy which is Flying Ant Day.

As in previous years, the date seems to be geographically clustered (which makes sense, I guess) and after an early misfire on Wood Lane a couple of weeks back, I can now confirm that it does, indeed, appear to be Flying Ant Day in London.

So we can see that the slight anomolies of early sightings we experienced in the last few years have now been corrected, and we’re back in the range of 2004.

This year has been notable not for the number of reports, but for the fact that so many people IMed/twittered/emailed me directly to let me know when they saw the little flying feckers, because (in the words of one) they now associate FAD with me. Bless.

But on a relevant note, Twitter has made it easier to track sightings.

For example, we can see that there have been 26 mentions of “flying ant” and 39 of “flying ants” (many mentioning London) in public twitter streams since lunchtime today. Before that, the previous mention was a week ago, then nothing much until three weeks back. So not only can we tell it’s FAD in London, but we can be reasonably sure that it started at lunchtime. How cool is that?

I’ve also noticed that I get a sense of flying ant season from looking at my site analytics. Over the past month there have been nearly a thousand searches resulting in a visit to my site from people looking for information about flying ants, and there are definite peaks in there (peak ant?): June 22, July 2, July 7, July 14. And today.